From Scientific America:
Thirty-three years into its voyage, the solar wind speed around Voyager 1 has dropped to zero as the space-hardened craft nears a milestone in its journey out of the solar system
In the past six months, Voyager 1 has signaled that the radial speed of the solar wind is zero, meaning that the spacecraft is approaching the final boundary of the solar system, the heliopause. Stone and his colleagues had not expected Voyager to reach this point for several more years, meaning that the boundary lies closer to the sun than they had thought…
And, here’s the really cool part:
Leaving the solar system, he says, will be “a milestone in human activity.” Both Voyagers will likely outlive Earth, he notes. When, billions of years from now, the sun swells into a red giant, the Voyagers, albeit with their radioactive generators long exhausted and instruments frozen, will continue to wend their lonely ways through interstellar space and remain on course for the unknown, bearing a record disk and images of 20th-century Earth, music from many of its cultures, and greetings in dozens of its languages. They may be the only evidence the human race ever existed.[full article]
That’s all well and good. Though, outliving us probably involves Voyager coming back to destroy humanity.
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