NASA confirmed an impressive feat today. The agency has confirmed that a man-made object has reached the space between the stars for the second time in history. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space after existing the heliosphere, the plasma bubble created by the sun which covers most of our solar system.
As previously mentioned, this is the second man-made object to achieve this milestone. The Voyager 1 probe was the first and it reached interstellar space back in 2012. The Voyager 2 probe has followed in its footsteps and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. The team members have crossed checked data from four onboard instruments to be absolutely sure about the probe crossing into interstellar space.
The Voyager 2 probe has a working instrument which can provide first-of-its-kind observations of the gateway into interstellar space. NASA’s mission operators are still able to communicate with the probe but the information now takes more than 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to the Earth even though it moves at the speed of light.
“I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, adding that “Now we’re looking forward to what we’ll be able to learn from having both probes outside the heliopause.”