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After 41 years of travel in the solar system, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has reached an area of space where the solar wind is no longer blowing, 18 billion kilometers from Earth, announced NASA Monday. On this extraordinary distance, each Voyager 2 message takes 16 hours to reach Earth, while, for example, the communication time with the speed of light with Mars is only eight minutes.
The good news of this Monday is the confirmation that Voyager 2 has come out of the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun and which has already pbaded through the world. heliopause, the limit beyond which the solar wind does not arrive.
Technically, however, the probe remains in the solar system, whose boundary is established at the edge of the Oort cloud, long after Pluto, and that NASA compares to a "big bubble around the solar system".
This cloud, probably composed of billions of frost bodies
This is the longest mission of the US space agency and its instruments continue to send observations today
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.
While he continued to operate after flying over Neptune, Nasa continued the mission, but
His twin probe, Voyager 1, which left the Earth 16 days later, has arrived in interstellar space. in 2012 and also continued to operate, but one of its essential instruments for measuring the solar wind, dubbed Plasma Science Experiment, broke in 1980.
"Now, it's even better," said Nicky Fox, director of the Isotope Department of Heliophysics at NASA. "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 limit being the gradual loss of capacity of their radioisotope generator, which provides the energy necessary 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 well be a day" the last vestiges of human civilization. "
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