This is extremely exciting news for the Star Wars fans. NASA has announced that the Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered interstellar space, which is the space between two stars. In simple language, this means the craft has ventured outside our solar system.
Exiting our solar system is one of the most important milestones for humankind, as this marks the first time that any man-made object has reached so far in space. And it has been there for nearly a year, since 25th August 2012. Scientists realized with a start that the spacecraft had been traveling through plasma, or ionised gas, for about a year, NASA reported.
Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, who is based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena was quoted by Indian Express as saying that, with this unexpected key data, NASA believes this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space.
"The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. Scientists do not know when Voyager will reach the undisturbed part of interstellar space where there is no influence from Sun," he continued. Don Gurnett at the University of Iowa, who led the analysis team, said, "We literally jumped out of our seats when we saw these oscillations in our data - they showed us the spacecraft was in an entirely new region, comparable to what was expected in interstellar space, and totally different than in the solar bubble.”
Voyager was launched in 1977, which was the same year Star Wars was released. University of Iowa physics professor Donald A. Gurnett was reported by The New York Times as saying, “I don’t know if it’s in the same league as landing on the moon, but it’s right up there — ‘Star Trek’ stuff, for sure.”
The probe is now 11.7 billion miles from Earth and is still traveling away at 38,000 miles an hour. A signal from Voyager takes 17 hours and 22 minutes to reach NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Voyager 1 spacecraft is nowhere near the current advances in technology, but it has achieved the distinction of being the longest running probe.
(AW: Sruthi)
