First interstellar man-made object, Voyager-I makes history

16 Sep 2013

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The Voyager-I spacecraft, launched by US space agency NASA back in 1977, today became the first man-made object to leave the Solar System.

Voyager -1Scientists say the probe's instruments indicate it has moved beyond the bubble of hot gas from the sun and is now moving in interstellar space.

Voyager was sent initially to study the outer planets, but then just kept on going. Today, the veteran NASA mission is almost 19 billion km from home, but still continues sending data.

This distance is so vast that it takes 17 hours now for a radio signal sent from Voyager to reach receivers on earth.

By today's standards, the spacecraft's technology is laughable - it carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a low-end iPhone.

When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn. But Voyager-I has become the 'little spacecraft that could,' as some astronomers have put it.

Even if accidental, NASA scientists see this as a breath-taking achievement that could only be fantasised about when Voyager was launched in 1977, the same year 'Star Wars' was released.

"This is really a key milestone that we'd been hoping we would reach when we started this project over 40 years ago - that we would get a spacecraft into interstellar space," said Prof Ed Stone, the chief scientist on the venture.

"Scientifically it's a major milestone, but also historically - this is one of those journeys of exploration like circumnavigating the globe for the first time or having a footprint on the Moon for the first time. This is the first time we've begun to explore the space between the stars," he told BBC News.

Sensors on Voyager had been indicating for some time that its local environment had changed.

The data that finally convinced the mission team to call the jump to interstellar space came from the probe's Plasma Wave Science (PWS) instrument. This can measure the density of charged particles in Voyager's vicinity.

Readings taken in April-May this year and October-November last year revealed a near-100-fold jump in the number of protons occupying every cubic metre of space.

Scientists have long theorised such a spike would eventually be observed if Voyager could get beyond the influence of the magnetic fields and particle wind that billow from the surface of the Sun.

When the Voyager team put the new data together with information from the other instruments onboard, they calculated the moment of escape to have occurred on or about 25 August, 2012.

This conclusion is contained in a report published by the journal Science.

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