Updated By: LatestGKGS Desk
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft reached into interstellar space
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft reached into interstellar space: Details, Objective, Significance, Highlights
NASA’s Voyager 2 has entered interstellar space, leaving behind the solar system. It took 41 years to reach there. It is now 18 billion kilometers from Earth but still within the solar system.
Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to venture into interstellar space. It is the only probe ever to study Neptune and Uranus during planetary flybys.
Voyager 2 is the second man-made object to leave our planet. It is now 11 billion miles from Earth, following behind its sister spacecraft, Voyager 1, which is 6 years ahead of it. The probe is estimated to be traveling at 34,000 mph.
Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited all four gas giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and discovered 16 moons, as well as phenomena like Neptune’s mysteriously transient Great Dark Spot, the cracks in Europa’s ice shell, and ring features at every planet.
Australian tracking stations play a vital role in monitoring its journey.
Background
The Voyager mission was launched in the 1970s, and the probes sent by NASA were only meant to explore the outer planets – but they just kept on going.
Voyager 1 departed Earth on 5 September 1977, a few days after Voyager 2 and left our solar system in 2013.
The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.
