Voyager 1

I heard on the news last night about Voyager 1 spacecraft leaving our solar system....I was wondering what it will find/run into outside our solar system, and how long it will be before it finds something. What do you think about this?

Twenty-six years and more than 8 billion miles from Earth, the durable Voyager 1 spacecraft has journeyed a greater distance than any other human-made object, but scientists are not sure exactly what it has encountered at the far frontier of the solar system.

One team of scientists reported on Wednesday that radioed data show that the spacecraft apparently ventured across a turbulent boundary near the edge of the solar system, where supersonic "winds" of charged particles from the sun collide with matter from interstellar space. No spacecraft has ever come close to the boundary, known as the termination shock.

At the same time, other scientists examining Voyager data argued that the boundary still lies ahead, though perhaps not too far.

The conflicting views were aired at a news conference at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington and are the subject of articles being published today in the journal Nature.

The team led by Dr. Stamatios Krimigis of the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University described sharp changes in the velocity -- from supersonic to subsonic -- and in constituents of the so-called solar wind that Voyager 1 began flying through in August 2002. The spacecraft appeared to have entered the termination shock region and about six months later, it re-entered a region of more normal solar wind conditions. In that interval, the spacecraft traveled more than 400 million miles.

Rest of the store.

Space, space and more space. Chances are that it'll begin shutting in down (in 2015) and run out of power before it reaches anything else interesting after breaching the boundaries of the solar system.



2015 - Terminate data tape recorder operations
2016 - Terminate gyro operations
2017 09-05 12:56:00 - 40 years of flight
2020 - Initiate instrument power shutdown
2026 - Potential end of mission. Not enough power for 1 single instrument
2028 - Reaches Heliopause
tbd - Passes within 1.6 light-years of Star AC+79 3888 in 40,000 years

But you never know, that's what makes outer space interesting!