Leaving the Sun's Empire - Voyager 1 Bears Interstellar Mission

From the beginning of time human beings have a fascination with flight, a dared endeavor which allows us to explore, scrutinize and understand the uncharted territory in sky. Evident in the news of Voyager’s departure from the solar system, it is obvious that our need to venture is never satiable.

Launched in 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft had reached the very edge of the solar system and had been probing through an unknown region of heliosphere and was officially announced entering interstellar space in September 12, 2013. Voyager 1 is the first artificial spacecraft that ever took a step beyond the realm of Sun.

According to NASA, Voyager 1 had detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere in 2004, the bubble of charged particles that reaches far beyond the outer planets. Yet it was obscure whether it was in interstellar space. Thanks to the solar wind burst in March 2012, the plasma around the spacecraft began to vibrate and was proved denser than what it had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this kind is to be expected in interstellar space. Now, by NASA’s Voyager scientists, Voyager has escaped the Sun’s empire and is currently in heliosheath, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago.

36 years and 19 billion kilometers from our sun, Voyager is the only man-made spacecraft that has been to somewhere no other things have been to before. As humanity’s most distant scout, with instruments and computer-controlled detectors, Voyager 1 is constantly sending data it observed to Earth. It is all true, the journey the Voyager 1 undertook is a magnificent exploration ever which marked a milestone for human being’s scientific and technological achievements and space exploration.

But for me, I doubted to a degree whether the news the NASA released is