Voyager 1 Makes Historic Leap Into Interstellar Space
September 12, 2013 03:50pm EST
NASA'S Voyager 1 has now officially reached interstellar space after 36 years, the first human-made object to do so.
Voyager 1 is now about 12 billion miles from our sun after first launching on Sept. 5, 1977, and is currently traveling at about 38,000 miles per hour. NASA said the spacecraft is "in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble," which can still feel some of the impact from our sun.
Being that Voyager 1 is so far away, scientists can't exactly just use GPS to pinpoint its location. Instead, they measure the plasma surrounding the spacecraft, which is ionized gas found in the space between stars that's created when they explode.
Unfortunately, Voyager 1 has not had a working plasma sensor since 1980. But a huge solar flare that took place in March 2012 helped determine Voyager 1's whereabouts. It took about a year for the effects of that flare - or coronal mass ejection - to reach Voyager 1, but when it did, in April 2013, the plasma around the spacecraft began to vibrate like a violin string.
"The pitch of the oscillations helped scientists determine the density of the plasma," NASA said. "The particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space."
The heliosphere is the region containing our solar system, solar wind, and the entire solar magnetic field. Now that Voyager 1 has journeyed beyond it, NASA scientists said today that it opens up a whole new era of space exploration.
"Leaving the heliosphere, Voyager has joined the other historic journeys of exploration like the first circumnavigation of the Earth and first footprint on the Moon," said Ed Stone, NASA Voyager project scientist.
"This is really just the beginning," agreed Gary Zank, director of the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research at the University of Alabama. "We're now going into a completely new environment. It's truly alien."
Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, also stressed that "the mission is not over."
NASA has enough power to operate Voyager's instruments until 2020, Dodd said today. At that point, NASA will then turn off one instrument at a time, which will give it another five years. Voyager can operate for about another 10 years beyond 2025 to take down engineering data, but NASA has about 13 to 14 years of usable exploration time ahead of it, she said.
Dodd noted that Voyager is equipped with a gold record that includes music and greetings from Earth - including a message from Carl Sagan. Ideally, it will serve as a time capsule of Earth should Voyager ever encounter extra-terrestrial beings.
A report about the team's findings, led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, was published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.
There was a false alarm earlier this year, when the American Geophysical Union (AGU) reported in March that the spacecraft had left the heliosphere. At the time, however, NASA said "it is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space." In June, the space agency was more optimistic, reporting that Voyager 1 would probably reach interstellar space within "several more months."
Voyager 2 was launched about two weeks before Voyager 1 back in 1977 and is now about 9.5 billion miles away from our sun. Scientists are "not certain when Voyager 2 is expected to cross into interstellar space, but they believe it is not very far behind," NASA said today.
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