"Voyager 1" leaves solar system

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The Voyager 1 spacecraft is an 815-kilogram uncrewed probe of the outer solar system and beyond, launched September 5, 1977, and currently operational. It is the farthest man-made object from Earth. The Voyager 1 spacecraft has moved into the solar system's final frontier, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to interstellar space. At 14 billion kilometers (93.3 astronomical units or 8.7 billion miles) from the Sun, Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath, a region beyond termination shock – the critical boundary that marks the transition from the solar system into interstellar space. At this distance, signals from Voyager 1 take more than thirteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a joint project of NASA and Caltech near Pasadena, California. Voyager 1 is on a hyperbolic trajectory and has achieved escape velocity, meaning that its orbit will not return to the inner solar system. Along with Pioneer 10, the now deactivated Pioneer 11, and its sister ship Voyager 2, Voyager 1 is becoming an interstellar probe.

Voyager 1 had as its primary targets the planets Jupiter and Saturn and their associated moons and rings; its current mission is the detection of the heliopause and particle measurements of solar wind and the interstellar medium. Both Voyager probes are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which have far outlasted their originally intended lifespan, and are now expected to continue to generate enough power to keep communicating with Earth until around the year 2020.
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Source: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
 
fjdouse said:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Has info on it, it's a wonderful achievement. There's a video on the above site in which Dr Ed Stone says the generators should last until 2020!

God's speed Voyager!
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It says so in the article of Wikipedia also:

Both Voyager probes are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which have far outlasted their originally intended lifespan, and are now expected to continue to generate enough power to keep communicating with Earth until around the year 2020.
Click to expand...
 
They're reading the magnetic measurements of the sun, and how far out they went. They're saying that Voyager went out of the solar system because it just recently passed the point where the sun's magnetic influence passed away.

It's also measuring cosmic rays. Really, though, the main point of Voyager was to see how far the sun's magnetic influence went.
 
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