Friday, June 22, 2012

Voyager 1 - first to leave the solar system

byArtist's rendering of Voyager 1.
by Carl Franzen, Talking Points Memo  Voyager first to leave solar system 




NASA’s unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, has become the first vessel in history to reach the edge of the solar system, NASA announced in mid-June.

It’s hard to overstate the milestone: At some point in the near future — it could be days or months, possibly, but not likely even a few years — Voyager is expected to break away from the bubble of particles emitted by the Sun encasing our solar system and enter the totally new, completely unexplored region of interstellar space, the black void separating us from the other star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy.