Friday 13 September 2013

VOYAGER HAS LEFT THE SOLAR SYSTEM!!

On Ricky Mae's things that fly, it simply had to be noted; Voyager 1 has left the solar system. I have Huffington Post to thank for the article, but it helps bring the achievement to bear. That's quite some flight taking 36 years and puts the universe into some kind of human perspective. It takes 36 years for an object travelling through our solar system to be unable to feel the energy of our sun. That's how big our sun is. I wonder where it will be 36 years from now?


Voyager 1 Leaves The Solar System (PICTURES)

Huffington Post UK  |  By Posted:
voyager 1
Artist's rendering shows one of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft
The Voyager 1 space probe has left the solar system.
After 36 years - and a couple of recent false alarms - Nasa now says that the craft has become the first manmade object to enter inter-stellar space.
Based on data about the hot gas on the edge of our Solar System, scientists can now be sure that the craft left our sun's heliosphere in August 2012.
The Voyager 1 probe was initially launched just to explore the planets of our solar system. But it continued to function beyond its engineers' expectations, and is still transmitting data even now it has left area of our sun's influence.
"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."
The remarkably durable craft has now travelled 11 billion miles, trailed at 9 billion miles by its successor, Voyager 2.
Voyager 1 will now travel alone in space, on a course for the star AC +793888 - which it will never reach.
Iconic Voyager Images
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