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Voyager 2 Enters
Interstellar Space

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[ ♪ ]

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We have ignition, and we have
liftoff of the Titan-Centaur

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carrying the first of two
Voyager spacecraft

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to extend man's senses farther
into the solar system

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than ever before.

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Suzanne Dodd: They were launched
in 1977. That's a long time ago.

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We say 41 years, but it's
really two generations ago.

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You can think of what the
technology was.

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Your smartphone has 200,000
times more memory

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than what the Voyager
spacecraft had.

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And so it's just exciting
that we've been able to

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get it into interstellar space.

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Ed Stone: We launched two
Voyager spacecraft.

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They're basically the same.

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But they were on
different paths.

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Voyager 2 was the one that was
chosen to do the Grand Tour.

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That is to fly by
Jupiter and then Saturn

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and then Uranus
and then Neptune.

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And then after 1989 we began
what is now called

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the Voyager
Interstellar Mission.

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We were on a path, we
hoped, to get to reach

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interstellar space while we
still had power on the

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spacecraft to transmit
the data back.

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And that's what Voyager 1
did in 2012.

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And that's now what Voyager 2 is
starting to do in 2018.

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The Sun creates this huge bubble
of plasma--ionized material

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goes outward at a
million miles per hour

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and creates a bubble.

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And inside the bubble,
most of the material

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has come from our Sun.
And the magnetic field

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has come from our Sun.

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Outside the bubble, most of
the material comes from

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other stars that exploded 5, 10,
15 million years ago.

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We have an instrument
which measures the wind

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coming from the Sun. And we
saw that, in fact, there was

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no longer any
measureable solar wind.

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We had left the bubble
basically.

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Dodd: The team has been
looking forward for this

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for a long time and
really working hard

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in an engineering sense to make
this day happen and

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to keep the spacecraft with
all the instruments on.

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So that all 5 instruments could
sense the heliopause crossing

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and have data for that.

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What that means is that the
Voyager 2 spacecraft

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is now traveling in
interstellar space.

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Stone: Well, this just
contributes to the number of

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discoveries that Voyager
has been making.

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And this is one we hoped we
would have the chance to do.

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And, fortunately, both
spacecraft were still operating

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when they reached
interstellar space.

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It's really quite...
quite remarkable.

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Voyager changed our view of the
solar system really.

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We saw this active volcanic
activity on Io.

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We saw the possibility of
an ocean on Europa.

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Just time after time we were
discovering things

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that we had not really
even imagined

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some years before the
Voyager mission.

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What makes it so exciting is
that not only do we confirm

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what we thought we knew,
but, even better,

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it tells us where we didn't know

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that there was something to
be discovered.

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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory