In a Breathtaking First, NASA’s Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System

But Voyager 1 has become — thrillingly — the Little Spacecraft That Could. On Thursday, scientists declared that it had become the first probe to exit the solar system, a breathtaking achievement that NASA could only fantasize about back when Voyager was launched in 1977, the same year “Star Wars” was released.

“I don’t know if it’s in the same league as landing on the moon, but it’s right up there — ‘Star Trek’ stuff, for sure,” said Donald A. Gurnett, a physics professor at the University of Iowa and the co-author of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science about Voyager’s feat. “I mean, consider the distance. It’s hard even for scientists to comprehend.”

Even among planetary scientists, who tend to dream large, the idea that something they built could travel beyond the Sun’s empire and keep grinding away is impressive. Plenty of telescopes gaze at the far parts of the Milky Way, but Voyager 1 can now touch and feel the cold, unexplored region in between the stars and send back detailed dispatches about conditions there. It takes 17 hours and 22 minutes for Voyager’s signals to reach NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory here.

“This is historic stuff, a bit like the first exploration of Earth, and we had to look at the data very, very carefully,” said Edward C. Stone, 77, NASA’s top Voyager expert, who has been working on the project since 1972. He said he was excited about what comes next. “It’s now the start of a whole new mission,” he said.

The lonely probe, which is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 miles per hour, has long been on the cusp, treading a boundary between the bubble of hot, energetic particles around the solar system and the dark region beyond. There, in interstellar space, the plasma, or ionized gas, is noticeably denser.

Dr. Gurnett and his team have spent the past few months analyzing their data, trying to nail down whether what they were seeing was solar plasma or the plasma of interstellar space. Now they are certain it was the latter, and have even pinpointed a date for the crossing: Aug. 25, 2012.

At a news conference on Thursday, NASA scientists were a bit vague about what they hope to get from Voyager 1 from now on. The answer, to some extent, depends on what instruments continue to function as the power supply dwindles. Dr. Stone expects Voyager 1 to keep sending back data — with a 23-watt transmitter, about the equivalent of a refrigerator light bulb — until roughly 2025.

One hope is that Voyager 1’s position will allow scientists to more accurately study galactic cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles that originate outside the solar system. They would use the information to make judgments about what interstellar space is like at even greater distances from Earth.

In its heyday, Voyager 1 pumped out never-before-seen images of Jupiter and Saturn. But it stopped sending home pictures in 1990, to conserve energy and because there was no longer much to see. A companion spacecraft, Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, has stopped sending back images as well. Voyager 2 is moving in a different direction but is also expected to exit the solar system.

Eventually, NASA said, the Voyagers will pass other stars, coasting and drifting and being pulled by gravity. The next big encounter for Voyager 1, in around 40,000 years, is expected to be a dwarf star dispassionately known as AC+793888 in the constellation of Camelopardalis.

But already, Voyager 1 has achieved what Dr. Gurnett called “the holy grail of heliosphere research.”

Voyager 1 left the solar system the same month that Curiosity, NASA’s state-of-the-art rover, landed on Mars and started sending home gorgeous snapshots. Curiosity’s exploration team, some 400 strong, promptly dazzled the world by driving the $2.5 billion robot across a patch of Martian terrain, a feat that turned the Red Bull-chugging engineers and scientists of Building 264 of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus into rock stars. By comparison, the Voyager mission looked like a Betamax in the era of Bluetooth.

The 12-person Voyager staff was long ago moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus to cramped quarters down the street, next to a McDonald’s. In an interview last month at Voyager’s offices, Suzanne R. Dodd, the Voyager project manager, said that when she attended meetings in Building 264, she kept a low profile in deference to the Mars team.

“I try to stay out of the elevator and take the stairs,” Ms. Dodd said. “They’re doing important work there, and I’ll only slow them down.”

At 52, Ms. Dodd is a relative newcomer to Voyager, first working on the mission in 1984. Now she and her team seem poised to return to the spotlight.

As the solar system’s edge grew tantalizingly close, NASA asked the Voyager scientists to increase the amount of data collection. The problem: the 8-track data recorders from 1977 were not exactly bursting with extra space. Could Ms. Dodd even find anyone who specialized in that piece of technology and could coax it to record more?

“These younger engineers can write a lot of sloppy code, and it doesn’t matter, but here, with very limited capacity, you have to be extremely precise and have a real strategy,” she said.

She was able to find her man: Lawrence J. Zottarelli, 77, a retired NASA engineer. He came up with a solution. But would it work?

Mr. Zottarelli waited at Voyager mission control one afternoon last month to find out. The first of the newly programmed data dumps was set to come down. Ms. Dodd, Dr. Stone and Mr. Zottarelli watched two old Sun Microsystems computers like children watching for a chick to peck through an egg. “Nine, eight, seven,” Dr. Stone counted down.

“Everything’s fine,” said Mr. Zottarelli, flashing a thumbs up. “You’re on your own now.”

The relief was written all over Ms. Dodd’s face. “It’s not easy flying an old spacecraft,” she said.

Her eyes moved to Dr. Stone, who was peering at a computer through his trifocals.

“There are lots of old missions,” he responded with a sly smile. “But not many are doing exciting new things.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 12, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Voyager 1. It is a spacecraft, not a satellite.

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NASA's Latest Mission To The Moon Is On Track

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer is on its way to the Moon. It lifted off on time Friday night from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Some early software problems have been successfully resolved.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

NASA's latest mission to the moon is stuck in orbit around the Earth. And that sounds bad. But as NPR Science Correspondent Joe Palca explains, it's actually normal.

JOE PALCA, BYLINE: The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE as the folks at NASA refer to it, is supposed to spend the next three weeks or so in orbit around the Earth. Each time around, LADEE will fire its engines, extending its orbit further and further from the Earth. Eventually, it will be so far out that the moon's gravity can take over. All told it will take about 30 days to reach the moon.

LADEE lifted off right on time this past Friday night from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.

LADEE was essentially asleep as it rode into space aboard a Minotaur V rocket. When the rocket dropped away, LADEE woke up and sent a status report back to Earth. Right away, mission controllers noticed that there was a problem. The spacecraft's four reaction wheels weren't working.

BUTLER HINE: A reaction wheel is a spinning disc, and you can turn a spacecraft by commanding the disc to spin faster.

PALCA: Butler Hine is LADEE project manager.

Without the reaction wheels, it would be hard to control the spacecraft. But as it turns out the reaction wheels were just fine, an overprotective software setting had shut them down. Hine said all they had to do was change the setting.

HINE: It actually only took us two hours to resolve the issue and then safely bring the reaction wheels back online.

PALCA: LADEE doesn't have any science to do until it reaches the moon, so Mission controllers will use the time while its looping the Earth to make sure all its hardware is working properly.

HINE: You look at the temperatures you're getting.You look at the voltages and currents your getting and then you tweak things. So we're in the tweaking phase but everything's looking really good right now.

PALCA: Once it gets to the moon, it has another 30 to 40 day check-out period, and then it can start its scientific mission of studying the tenuous lunar atmosphere and taking samples of lunar dust float above the Moon's surface.

Joe Palca, NPR News.

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