NASA’s Voyager 2 has become the second human-made object in history to reach the edge of our solar system, after the spacecraft exited the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.
Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 — launched 41 years ago — carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.
Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 18 billion kilometres from Earth. While the probes have left the heliosphere, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have not yet left the solar system, and won’t be leaving anytime soon.
Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information — moving at the speed of light — takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light travelling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.
NASA also is preparing an additional mission — the upcoming Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), due to launch in 2024 — to capitalise on the Voyagers’ observations. Voyager 2 launched in 1977, 16 days before Voyager 1, and both have travelled well beyond their original destinations. The spacecraft were built to last five years and conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn.
However, as the mission continued, additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, proved possible.
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