A NASA spacecraft has fit only the second manmade object in history to reach interstellar space.
NASA’s Voyager 2 has now exited the heliosphere – the vigilant bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun – the space agency announced on Monday.
The craft is now 11 billion miles from planet, in a boundary area known as the heliopause, where it will collect ground-breaking data.
Twin probe Voyager 1 crossed into the heliopause in 2012, but its Plasma Method Experiment (PLS) instrument – which Voyager 2 will use to gather information – was no longer working.
Launched weeks before Voyager 1 in 1977, Voyager 2 was instance built to last five years and conduct studies of Jupiter and Saturn. The craft has continued to travel however and after 41 years in leeway, is now NASA’s longest-running mission.
Mission operators can communicate with Voyager 2, but information being transmitted from the study takes more than 16 hours to reach earth.
“Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because the entirety we’re seeing is new,” John Richardson, principal investigator for the PLS instrument, said in a press release. “Even though Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012, it did so at a special place and a different time, and without the PLS data. So we’re seeing things that no one has seen before.”
“To have the Voyagers sending subsidize information about the edge of the Sun’s influence gives us an unprecedented glimpse of truly uncharted territory,” Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Border at NASA, added.
Voyager’s science team will also study data collected by three other onboard gizmos – the cosmic ray subsystem, the low energy charged particle instrument, and the magnetometer – all built to give a clearer picture of the environment Voyager 2 is touring through.
NASA has said it is preparing another mission launch in 2024 to build on the observations from both Voyager spacecrafts.
Although the explorations have left the heliosphere, neither Voyagers have yet left the solar system, which NASA considers to be beyond the edgy of the Oort Cloud.
The Oort Cloud is a collection of small objects influenced by the Sun’s gravity. NASA said this bounds could take up to 30,000 years to fly through.