FAR OUT

NASA’s Voyager 2 Becomes Second Man-Made Object to Exit Our Solar System

The NASA probe left Earth in 1977.

A space probe launched in 1977 has now exited our Solar System, NASA announced at this year’s American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington D.C. The Voyager 2 probe is now the second human-made object to leave our Solar System. The probe was initially launched to study the outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—but once that task was completed in 1989, it just kept on going. “Every so often they phone home and say—‘I’m still going. Don’t forget about me!’” said Voyager project manager, Suzanne Dodd. According to NASA, the probe has a working instrument aboard that will provide new observations about the nature of this “gateway into interstellar space.”

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