Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 at the edge of the solar system The Voyager 1 spacecraft has officially left the solar system and is exploring a cold, dark region in outer space, NASA said Thursday of the pioneering probe launched in 1977. \"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is humankind\'s historic leap into interstellar space,\" said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
\"The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we\'ve all been asking: \'Are we there yet?\' Yes, we are.\"
The precise position of Voyager has been fiercely debated in the past year, because scientists have not known exactly what it would look like when the spacecraft crossed the boundary of the solar system -- and the tool on board that was meant to detect the change broke long ago.
However, US space agency scientists now agree that Voyager is officially outside the protective bubble known as the heliosphere that extends at least eight billion miles (13 billion kilometers) beyond all the planets in our solar system, and has entered a region known as interstellar space.
Their findings -- which describe the conditions that show Voyager actually left the solar system in August 2012 -- are published in the US journal Science.
Source: AFP