A key milestone has been reached.
The Voyager 1 probe was launched 45 years ago. Taking advantage of a favorable solar system alignment, the two spaceships were designed to fly past Jupiter andSaturn. The spacecraft was not expected to be working for more than 40 years. The Voyagers are going to be in space for a long time. The distance from Earth to the sun is more than two-thirds the distance from our planet to the ocean.
Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement (opens in new tab) that the two Voyagers are providing humans with observations of unexplored territory.
Take a look at the amazing images of our solar system in the gallery.
NASA was able to fix a glitch that caused the craft to rely on a dead computer, which resulted in the probe sending gibberish data back to Earth.
According to a NASA statement, mission personnel are still looking into what caused the switch.
The mission's milestone came quickly after the 1977 launch. The first look at Jupiter was given to Voyager 1 in April 1978. The strange volcanic surface of Io was glimpsed by the spacecraft.
The probe flew past the largest moon in the world, Titan, just over two years after it was launched. It didn't make any more flybys after it detoured to catch a closer look at Titan.
The distance from Earth to the sun was marked 100 times in 2006 by NASA.
The bubble formed by charged particles constantly streaming off the sun and out into space is the region beyond the heliosphere. Cosmic rays, fragments of atoms that zip through space, are more likely to be found beyond the heliosphere.
This is the first time we've been able to directly study how a star interacts with the particles and magnetic fields outside our heliosphere, helping scientists understand the local neighborhood between the stars.
As time passes and the probe's nuclear power source weakens, mission personnel believe they will need to turn off additional instruments.
The probes will remain in space for billions of years.
Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyagers at JPL, said that they have continued to make amazing discoveries. Even though we don't know how long the mission will last, we can be sure that it will provide more scientific surprises as they travel farther away from the Earth.
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