Voyager 1 on a new adventure - by Abinyah Walker

Voyager 1, is the most distant spacecraft from Earth, and it has reached a new milestone on its 14 billion kilometre quest to exit the Solar System.

The particles that shoot out from the sun have made a distinct change in direction signalling voyagers approach to the yet unexplored region of our solar system, the heliopause.

Voyager 1, launched on September 5, 1977 has been travelling for 33 years. It's initial mission as a deep space probe was to visit our outter system planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  It completed it's flybys of our large gasseous plannets in 1989, at which time it was redirected towards deep space in the direction of the glactic centre.  

How is Voyager 1 able to stay in communication with earth after 33 years in the deep cold of space?  Voyager 1 carries a plutonium-238 power cell which has kept it's instruments working to detect the suns energenic particles and transmit its findings back to earth.  The regions called the heliopause and terminal shock of our outter solar system are of particular interest to science.  These regions are where the particles sent out from the sun at near the speed of light suddenly change direction or come to a stop having reached a zone carved out by the protective bubble generated by our sun colliding with the interstellar space of our milky way galaxy. 

The suns particles are colliding with matter from others stars in our galaxy indicating Voyager has neared the Heliosheath. These first signs has come from Voyager 1 in recent weeks.