Voyager 1
Space pioneer Voyager 1 has gone where no man-made object has gone before. The tiny spacecraft continues on its 36-year mission, 12 billion miles from Earth, traveling into interstellar space - outside of our solar system.
Interstellar space is the area between stars and contains plasma that originated from the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Voyager is now encountering solar wind which is plasma that originated from our sun. For example, a coronal mass ejection from the sun in March, 2012 reached Voyager in April, 2013 and its effect allowed scientists to determine that Voyager had crossed the threshold of interstellar space.
"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's first encounter into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "We literally jumped out of our seats when we saw these oscillations in our data."
This gallery, which was last updated in June 2013, contains the most incredible images from Voyager 1 and it's twin, Voyager 2 - from the launch in 1977 to their encounter with the giant planets of our solar system. Voyager 2 is also keeping communication with Earth and is about 15 billion miles away.
