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posted by martyb on Thursday April 18 2019, @02:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the coasting-through-the-remnants-of-long-dead-stars dept.

The human race is now two for two with Voyager 2 being the second human made spacecraft to enter interstellar space.

The probe, which blasted into space 41 years ago, exited the outer boundary of the sun's heliosphere on Nov. 5, NASA scientists announced Monday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. It is now more than 11 billion miles away from Earth.

The edge of the heliosphere is a pressure front of solar winds plasma originating from the sun, and is considered the boundary between stellar and interstellar space.

Because the heliopause marks the boundary between matter originating from the Sun and matter originating from the rest of the galaxy, spacecraft such as the two Voyagers, which have departed the heliosphere, can be said to have reached interstellar space.

Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in late August of 2012. Voyager 2, which was launched 16 days after it, has taken significantly longer to get there. This is because while both Voyagers flew past Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 immediately set out for the stars while Voyager 2 did flybys of Uranus and Neptune first.

Fortunately Voyager 2's plasma science instrument remains functioning (the one on Voyager 1 broke in the 1980s) so additional data was captured on this transition.

They still have a very long way to go before they leave the solar system. NASA estimates it could take 30,000 years for Voyager 2 to fly all the way through the Oort Cloud, a spherical shell of icy objects that scientists believe is a source of many comets. Only then will the solar system be in Voyager 2's rearview mirror.

They won't realize it however. Power on the two spacecraft will be exhausted in another 5-10 years at which point they will become as dark and cold as last week's coffee.


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