Voyager 1, which was launched 35 years ago, is now the most distant man-made object to leave our planet. But where is it now? According to W.R. Webber of the New Mexico State University Department of Astronomy and F.B. McDonald of the University of Maryland Institute of Physical Science and Technology, the probe left the Solar System on August last year. It seems that Nasa doesn’t agree though.

Launched on 5^th September 1977, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979 before visiting Saturn in 1980. Helped by the giant planets, the probe was shot toward interstellar space.

Weber and McDonald say that Anomalous Cosmic Rays (ACR), cosmic ray particles trapped by the Sun’s magnetic field, used to dominate the radiation detected by the probe before August 25, 2012. But on that day, ACR intensity dropped to less than one percent within hours, and kept on decreasing over the days that followed. Meanwhile, they noted an increase in the intensity of Galactic Cosmic Rays, which are from outside the Solar System. They are saying that this data suggests that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System.

Webber says, “Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere“.

But NASA disagrees. Back in December 2012, the Voyager team announced that Voyager 1 is within ‘the magnetic highway’, a region where energetic particles changed dramatically. NASA says that an indicator of the probe reaching interstellar space will be a change in the direction of the magnetic field. That change is yet to happen.

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Remember that project proposed by BTE-Dan? Remember how he wanted to make a real life version of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, drawing up all the necessary plans to do so? Thanks to some new DARPA funding, that dream could soon become a reality.

Sort of. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just received $500,000 in seed money from the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence to form 100 Year Starship (100YSS). The goal of this non-governmental initiative is to facilitate human interstellar flight within the next 100 years. The independent organization works with experts across many fields–like scientists and engineers, as well as artists and entertainers–to achieve this goal.

To be fair, half a million dollars isn’t going to do much. The “proposed” Gen1 Enterprise is estimated to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion dollars. We also have to realize that Voyager 1 is only just about to become the first manmade object to leave our solar system and it has taken the probe 35 years to get to the heliosphere. To have a starship capable of transporting humans that far for that long, let alone beyond our solar system, is quite the ambitious task indeed. Voyager 1, if it maintains its current pace of 3.6AU (about 334 million miles) per year would take another 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, our next closest star.

As an aside, the Gen1 Enterprise is intended for intrastellar (within our solar system) missions, whereas the DARPA funding is more about going much, much further. Either way, I’m sure Neil deGrasse Tyson approves of this badass idea. We just have to come up with the other $999,500,000… and well, the tech and innovation to do it.

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