Indepednet, UK
Nasa’s pioneering Voyager 2 spacecraft has left the Solar System.
The craft – which left Earth in 1970 and has been flying through space ever since – becomes only the second ever man-made object to make it out of our galactic neighbourhood.
It follows Voyager 1 in venturing out into interstellar space, according to Nasa’s Ed Stone, who made the announcement at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Voyager 2 takes with it a pioneering instrument that send back observations of this uncharted part of space, beaming them over 11 billion miles to Nasa scientists. Mission operators are still able to communicate with the spacecraft but it takes information – moving at the speed of light – a full 16.5 hours to make the long journey.
Nasa declared the spacecraft had left when the onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS) showed that it was no longer detecting the plasma flowing out the sun. That outflow creates a bubble called the heliosphere, which envelopes the planets of the solar system and represents the edge of the solar system.
“Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we’re seeing is new,” said John Richardson, principal investigator for the PLS instrument and a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
“Even though Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012, it did so at a different place and a different time, and without the PLS data. So we’re still seeing things that no one has seen before.”