So long - from 18 billion miles away..

[Rum]

Voyager has 'officially' left the solar system. Next stop in ten thousand years..

Here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21866532

The Voyager-1 spacecraft has left the Solar System, the first man-made object to do so.

Launched in September 1977, the probe was sent initially to study the outer planets, but then just kept on going.

The US space agency (Nasa) reports that Voyager has now entered a realm of space beyond the influence of our Sun.

This interstellar region is calculated to be more than 18 billion km from Earth, or 123 times the distance between our planet and the Sun.

Voyager-1 is on course to approach a star called AC +793888, but it will only get to within two light-years of it and it will be tens of thousands of years before it does so.

Confirmation of the probe's exit from the heliosphere - the bubble of gas and magnetic fields originating from the Sun - was confirmed on Tuesday in a release by the American Geophysical Union.

No human artefact has ever reached so deep into the cosmos.

A measure of the distance travelled is that it takes a staggering 16 hours for Voyager 1's radio messages to arrive on Earth.

Standing in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California two years ago, I watched as data from the lonely craft flickered across giant screens.

The scientist behind the mission, Ed Stone, talked in adoring terms of the 70s technology that has survived decades of hurtling through space to become mankind's most distant emissary.

NASA has speculated for years about the actual moment of crossing from our solar system into the void; and now it's happened.

The next time the craft will come even remotely close to another star? About 40,000 years.


The organisation has accepted a scholarly paper on the topic from Nasa scientists that will be published shortly in the house journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The announcement had been expected for some time.

Voyager had been monitoring changes in its environment that suggested it was about to cross the Solar System's border - the so-called heliopause.

It had been detecting a rise in the number of high-energy particles or cosmic rays, coming towards it from interstellar space, while at the same time recording a decline in the intensity of energetic particles coming from behind, from our Sun.

A big change occurred on 25 August last year, which scientists said was like a "heliocliff".

"Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere," explained Prof Bill Webber from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Voyager-1 was launched on 5 September 1977, and its sister spacecraft, Voyager-2, on 20 August 1977.

The probes' initial goal was to survey the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - a task they completed in 1989.

They were then despatched towards deep space, in the general direction of the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Their plutonium power sources will stop generating electricity in about 10-15 years, at which point their instruments and transmitters will die.

The Voyagers will then become "silent ambassadors" from Earth as they move through the Milky Way.

[klr]

Ah, so that's why BBC4 has been repeating all those Voyager specials recently.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

V-ger will be back. And we'd better be ready to communicate when it does.

[klr]

Actually, any aliens that find it will probably think "THAT'S what they use for sound reproduction?"

[cronus]

Hungry aliens. They'll track it back and know what the main dish looks like when they get here.

[FBM]

70's technology. I guess it has an 8-track in it.

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

70's technology. I guess it has an 8-track in it.

More primitive than that, I'm afraid. Let's hope dem aleyuns got gramophones:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

[Gawdzilla Sama]

70's technology. I guess it has an 8-track in it.

More primitive than that, I'm afraid. Let's hope dem aleyuns got gramophones:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Meh, one of my troopers bought a boom box with a turntable in it in 1983.

[Ian]

V-ger...

[JimC]

The plutonium will tell them a lot about us...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

V-ger...

L8

[FBM]

70's technology. I guess it has an 8-track in it.

More primitive than that, I'm afraid. Let's hope dem aleyuns got gramophones:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

They may as well have put pornography on it. There's not much chance of the aliens having a pornograph, either.

[PsychoSerenity]

Voyager has 'officially' left the solar system. Next stop in ten thousand years..

Here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21866532

Goodbye and good luck.

[mistermack]

Voyager-1 was launched on 5 September 1977, and its sister spacecraft, Voyager-2, on 20 August 1977.

Didn't they have calculators back in those days? Or had they just forgot that 1 comes before 2?

Anyway, it's nice to know that interstellar space has nothing nasty that we didn't know about.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

70's technology. I guess it has an 8-track in it.

More primitive than that, I'm afraid. Let's hope dem aleyuns got gramophones:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

They may as well have put pornography on it. There's not much chance of the aliens having a pornograph, either.

If aliens find that thing IN SPACE, I think they'll figure it out.