More than four decades after its launching, NASA\u2019s famed spacecraft Voyager 2 made a milestone move into interstellar space \u2014 beyond the realm of the\u2026<\/b>
\nMore than four decades after its launching, NASA\u2019s famed spacecraft Voyager 2 made a milestone move into interstellar space \u2014 beyond the realm of the sun\u2019s influence, the agency announced on Monday.
The Voyager 2, launched in 1977, is renowned as the only probe ever to study Neptune and Uranus during planetary flybys.
Now it\u2019s accomplished an even more remarkable feat, exiting the heliosphere \u2014 the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun \u2014 and entering the space between the stars, NASA said in a statement.
Mission scientists determined that the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere \u2014 known as the heliopause, on Nov. 5. That boundary is where the bubble created by the hot solar wind ends, according to NASA.
They made that discovery through an onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), which detects the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind.
\u201cWe have an instrument which measures the wind coming from the sun, and we saw in fact that there was no longer any measurable solar wind,\u201d Edward Stone, the Voyager mission\u2019s project scientist, said in a video released Monday. \u201cWe had left the bubble basically.\u201d
Voyager 2 is now just over 11 billion miles from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with it at this point, but information \u2014 moving at the speed of light \u2014 takes about 16.5 hours to reach Earth, according to NASA.
\u201cWorking on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we\u2019re seeing is new,\u201d John Richardson, a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said in NASA\u2019s statement. \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