Rewind the clock back to 1977; NASA launched the Voyager 1. It's mission? To explore the two largest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn. On November 16th, 1980, it captured photographs of Saturn from a distance of just 5.3 million kilometres away (not a lot, in space terms). Four days later Jupiter was also caught on camera. The mission was complete. But it wasn't stopping there...
Determination resulted in three decades of constant travelling, slowly escaping from the solar system's grasp. And now, at a distance of close to 11 billion miles from the sun, NASA confirmes that Voyager 1 is on the verge of leaving us forever.
This will make Voyager 1 the first man-made object to go above and beyond what once was thought technically impossible. It will reach what astronomers call the 'interstellar medium', the matter which fills the gaps between scattered star systems. It shouldn't take long for us to find out what space is really like.
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