Probe launched 41 years ago in interstellar space Image created by NASA to represent the two Voyager probes, there are only two points left, at the heliosphere limit – NASA / JPL-CALTECH / AFP

<img src = "https://cdn-istoe-ssl.akamaized.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2018/12/bb24d3f608996fb7bc7f12251fb5c101e6dbaf7c-418×235.jpg" title = "Sonda Launched há 41 years After 41 years of the solar system, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has reached an area of ​​space where the solar wind no longer blows, 18 billion kilometers from the Earth, announced Monday the NASA It takes 16 hours to Voyager 2 to reach the Earth, while, for example, the communication time at the speed of light with Mars is only eight minutes.

The Big News this Monday is confirmation that Voyager 2 came out of the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun and which has already pbaded through the heliopause, the limit beyond which the solar wind does not reach.

Technically, the probe stays in the solar system, whose boundary is established the borders of cloud & # 39; Oort long after Pluto, and that NASA compares to a "big bubble around the solar system."

This cloud, probably composed of billions of icy bodies, remains under the influence of the gravity of the sun and it would take 30,000 years for Voyager 2.

This is the longest mission from the US Space Agency.

Launched when Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was president of the United States, he flew over Jupiter in 1979, then Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in 1989.

How it worked later

In 2012, he was has become the longest and most mythical mission of the American Space Agency.

Its dual probe, Voyager 1, which left the Earth 16 days later, arrived in interstellar space in 2012 and also continued to operate, but one of its essential instruments to measure the solar wind, dubbed Plasma Science Experiment, burst. 1980.

"Now it's even better," said Nicky Fox, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division. "The information sent by Voyager on the limits of Sun's influence provides an unprecedented view of a truly virgin territory."

Both probes are "very good," said Suzanne Dodd, director of interplanetary communications.

According to her, they can last another five or six years, their only limitation being the gradual loss of capacity of their radioisotope generator, which provides the energy needed for the disintegration of radioactive materials. one of them takes recordings of sounds and images of the Earth on gold and copper plates and, even if they were extinguished, the devices would continue to potentially travel for billions of years with their records, making them "time capsules that may one day be" the last vestiges of human civilization, "NASA said in its statement