Some 33 years after it was launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has reached the outer edge of the solar system and is on course to become the first man-made device to sail into the vast stretches of space that lie beyond. Astronomers have confirmed that the spacecraft has reached a region called the heliopause, where the solar winds that have blown past Voyager for the last 10 billion miles slow to a stop.
Voyager 1 is one of the most successful space missions of all time. Launched in 1977, it visited Jupiter and then Saturn, providing better close-ups of the two planets than had ever been seen before. But it sailed on, crossing the orbits of both Uranus and Neptune.
Over all those years, there has been one constant in the Voyager flight: the solar wind blowing past it. This stream of subatomic particles leaves the Sun at hundreds of kilometers per second, much faster than Voyager. But now, after 33 years, that has changed: at 17 billion kilometers (10.6 billion miles) from the Sun, the spacecraft has reached the point where the solar wind has slowed to a stop. Literally, the wind is no longer at Voyager’s back.
Scientists suspect that spacecraft is getting closer to interstellar space where the interstellar wind’s pressure is turning away the solar wind as suspected and hence the spacecraft believed to be in the closer areas to interstellar space. It is now at 10.8 billion miles away from the Sun.
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"When Voyager was launched, the space age itself was only 20 years old, so there was no basis to know that spacecraft could last so long," a project scientist tells the BBC. "We had no idea how far we would have to travel to get outside the solar system. We now know that in roughly five years, we should be outside for the first time."
Voyager 1 is traveling at about 38,000mph and its radio signals are taking about sixteen hours to reach Earth. These are some impressive numbers, Voyager 1 is an important spacecraft for NASA scientists, and we expect it to do its jobs for many years to come.
Succeeding Voyager 1, its sister spacecraft Voyager 2 had been launched on Aug. 20, 1977 and has reached 8.8 billion miles away from the Sun and it’s traveling at 35,000mph. It should reach the same distance as Voyager 1 in the next years and in about a decade it should leave our solar system.
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