Has NASA’s Voyager 1 discovered a new region of space?
Voyager 1 is on its way to becoming humanity’s first-ever interstellar spacecraft. Having spent more than 36 years flying through space and, in that time, traveled more than 11 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft is advancing toward the outer point where the sun’s radiation gives way to the cosmic-ray particles of deep space.
NASA launched Voyager 1 and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, in 1977 and sent them en route to Jupiter, Saturn, and the other outer planets. Voyager 1 extensively surveyed Jupiter and Saturn, in the process discovering volcano’s on Jupiter’s moon Io and providing intricate close-up photography of Saturn’s rings. Voyager 2, meanwhile, explored Uranus and Neptune.
Both Voyagers passed the orbit of Pluto in 1989 and are now deep within the heliosheath, an outer zone where outgoing radiation from the sun runs up against interstellar gas and dust, in the process creating massive, turbulent clouds of charged particles. Voyager 1 entered the heliosheath in August of last year, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), which manages both Voyager missions. It took all those years to reach the heliosheath, as its beginning point starts at about twice the distance between the sun and Pluto.
The next threshold to cross will be the heliopause, the heliosheath’s outer boundary. Voyager 1 will get there first, as it is more than 2 billion miles further along on its journey than is Voyager 2—the two spacecraft are, respectively, 11.5 billion miles and 9.4 billion miles distant from Earth.
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