We did it! NASA's 36-year-old Voyager 1 probe officially became "the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space."
The probe, located has been travelling through plasma or ionized gas present in the space between stars, and now it has finally broken the barrier, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release reported.
"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, said. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."
The craft does not possess a working plasma sensor, so scientists needed to be creative in figuring out if Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space.
The team got what they needed during a coronal mass ejection (a magnetic burst of solar wind). The event caused the plasma around Voyager 1 to vibrate "like a violin string," allowing the craft's plasma wave instrument to pick up the movement.
"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," team leader Don Gurnett, said. "Clearly we had passed through the heliopause, which is the long-hypothesized boundary between the solar plasma and the interstellar plasma."
The new data suggests Voyager 1 first reached interstellar space on Aug. 25, 2012. Researchers believe the craft will continue sending back data on deep space until at least the year 2020.
"Voyager has boldly gone where no probe has gone before, marking one of the most significant technological achievements in the annals of the history of science, and adding a new chapter in human scientific dreams and endeavors," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington, said. "Perhaps some future deep space explorers will catch up with Voyager, our first interstellar envoy, and reflect on how this intrepid spacecraft helped enable their journey."
