Voyager 2 Enters
Interstellar Space
[ ♪ ]
We have ignition, and we have
liftoff of the Titan-Centaur
carrying the first of two
Voyager spacecraft
to extend man's senses farther
into the solar system
than ever before.
Suzanne Dodd: They were launched
in 1977. That's a long time ago.
We say 41 years, but it's
really two generations ago.
You can think of what the
technology was.
Your smartphone has 200,000
times more memory
than what the Voyager
spacecraft had.
And so it's just exciting
that we've been able to
get it into interstellar space.
Ed Stone: We launched two
Voyager spacecraft.
They're basically the same.
But they were on
different paths.
Voyager 2 was the one that was
chosen to do the Grand Tour.
That is to fly by
Jupiter and then Saturn
and then Uranus
and then Neptune.
And then after 1989 we began
what is now called
the Voyager
Interstellar Mission.
We were on a path, we
hoped, to get to reach
interstellar space while we
still had power on the
spacecraft to transmit
the data back.
And that's what Voyager 1
did in 2012.
And that's now what Voyager 2 is
starting to do in 2018.
The Sun creates this huge bubble
of plasma--ionized material
goes outward at a
million miles per hour
and creates a bubble.
And inside the bubble,
most of the material
has come from our Sun.
And the magnetic field
has come from our Sun.
Outside the bubble, most of
the material comes from
other stars that exploded 5, 10,
15 million years ago.
We have an instrument
which measures the wind
coming from the Sun. And we
saw that, in fact, there was
no longer any
measureable solar wind.
We had left the bubble
basically.
Dodd: The team has been
looking forward for this
for a long time and
really working hard
in an engineering sense to make
this day happen and
to keep the spacecraft with
all the instruments on.
So that all 5 instruments could
sense the heliopause crossing
and have data for that.
What that means is that the
Voyager 2 spacecraft
is now traveling in
interstellar space.
Stone: Well, this just
contributes to the number of
discoveries that Voyager
has been making.
And this is one we hoped we
would have the chance to do.
And, fortunately, both
spacecraft were still operating
when they reached
interstellar space.
It's really quite...
quite remarkable.
Voyager changed our view of the
solar system really.
We saw this active volcanic
activity on Io.
We saw the possibility of
an ocean on Europa.
Just time after time we were
discovering things
that we had not really
even imagined
some years before the
Voyager mission.
What makes it so exciting is
that not only do we confirm
what we thought we knew,
but, even better,
it tells us where we didn't know
that there was something to
be discovered.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute
of Technology
