{"id":18241,"date":"2018-12-10T23:28:48","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T15:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-says-its-voyager-2-probe-has-entered-interstellar-space-six-years-after-voyager-1\/"},"modified":"2018-12-10T23:28:48","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T15:28:48","slug":"nasa-says-its-voyager-2-probe-has-entered-interstellar-space-six-years-after-voyager-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-says-its-voyager-2-probe-has-entered-interstellar-space-six-years-after-voyager-1\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA says its Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space, six years after Voyager 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Voyager
This illustration shows the positions of NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, outside of the heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the Sun that extends well past the orbit of Pluto. Sizes and distances are not shown to scale. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA \/ JPL-Caltech Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA says its Voyager 2 probe has become the second human-made object to fly into interstellar space \u2014 six years after its twin, Voyager 1, became the first.<\/p>\n

Based on readings from its onboard instruments, the mission\u2019s scientists have determined that Voyager 2 has left the solar system\u2019s heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun. The spacecraft is now journeying in a region where the cold, dense interstellar medium takes the place of the tenuous, hot solar wind \u2014 more than 11 billion miles from Earth.<\/p>\n

The milestone came more than 41 years after Voyager 2\u2019s launch in 1977 on what was then a grand interplanetary mission, and is now a grand interstellar mission. During the 1970s and 1980s, Voyager 2 took on a \u201cGrand Tour\u201d with close flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, while Voyager 1 took a different course that featured a close-up of the Saturnian moon Titan.<\/p>\n

Scientists discussed the mission\u2019s status today in conjunction with this week\u2019s American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

The most compelling evidence of the probe\u2019s passage across the heliopause \u2014 that is, the boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space \u2014 came in the form of data from its Plasma Science Experiment, or PLS, an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980.<\/p>\n

The detector monitors the electrical current in plasma flowing out from the sun to measure the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind. On Nov. 5, Voyager 2\u2019s PLS detected a sharp decline in the speed of solar wind particles, and since then, no solar wind has been detected in the environment surrounding the probe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we\u2019re seeing is new,\u201d MIT\u2019s John Richardson, principal investigator for the PLS instrument, said in a news release from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cEven 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\u2019re still seeing things that no one has seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n