Learn about Voyager 1, which has now traveled 11 billion miles from Earth.
The Voyager 1 was built by NASA and launched 35 years ago, in 1977. Since then, it has travelled 11,100,000,000 miles, and last week, it left the heliosphere, the very edge of our solar system.
The Voyager 1, which has enough batteries to last until 2020, continues to communicate with scientists on Earth through radio waves. It's beginning to send signals that it is experiencing heat, which leads scientists to believe it is approaching the heliosheath. The heliosheath is like a bubble around the solar system that protects us from the cosmic winds of deep space.
Voyager scientist Edward Stone said, "This is the first time any spacecraft has been there. We're looking at our data every day-- we listen to these spacecraft every day, for a few hours every day-- to keep track of what's going on... It's very exciting from a scientific point of view, when you're seeing something that nobody's seen before. Since nothing's ever been there before, we don't know what it will look like, which makes it a little hard to recognize "it" at all. That's the exciting thing."
Thanks to the Daily Mail for this story.
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