Forty years ago, Nasa rocket scientists sought to answer this question by launching the Voyager spacecraft, twin unmanned spaceships that would travel further than any human-made object in history. “None of us knew, when we launched 40 years ago, that anything would still be working, and continuing on this pioneering journey,” said Voyager project scientist Ed Stone. The Voyager mission also discovered the first active volcanoes beyond Earth on Jupiter’s moon Io, and signs of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Voyager 1 has travelled farther than any human-made spacecraft, and made it to interstellar space, about 13 billion miles away from Earth, in August 2012. Scientists still hear from the Voyager spacecraft daily, and expect to get data for about another decade.

Source: Mint August 27, 2017 08:26 UTC