the-star-stuff:

NASA’s Voyager 1 has reached the very fringes of our solar system, and is preparing to leave for good

When NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1977, its primary mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets in our solar system. On November 16, 1980, the spacecraft captured this photograph of Saturn from a distance of just 5.3-million kilometers.

Four days later, Voyager 1’s primary mission drew to a close — but its journey was just beginning. For over three decades, the 1600-pound space probe has been putting distance between itself and the Sun at speeds approaching 11 miles per second, in the process becoming the most far-flung object we’ve ever put in space. And now, at a distance of close to 11 billion miles from the Sun, NASA says Voyager 1 is on the verge of leaving our Solar System forever.

When it does, Voyager 1 will become the first man-made object to soar through what astronomers refer to as the interstellar medium, the matter that makes up the regions of space interspersed between our galaxy’s scattered star systems.

“Voyager tells us now that we’re in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system,” explains Ed Stone, the Voyager project scientist at Caltech. “[It’s] showing that what is outside is pushing back. We shouldn’t have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like.”

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