In the late summer and early fall of 1977, twin space crafts called voyager1 and

voyager 2 sailed into space, bound for far reaches of the planets. Like the ancient
mariners, they would navigate a vast ocean, the solar system, in a path breaking
bid to explore the mysterious outer planets.
They carried star sensors and plutonium batteries, new to exploration that suddenly
opened spaces outer precincts to human inquiry. Their navigators sat in faraway
place, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where the sent
piecemeal instruction to spacecrafts steering computers
On the long, strange trip they started that year, the two Voyager spacecraft would
reveal that the moons orbiting Jupiter were worlds in their own right, that Saturn's
fabled rings boasted intricate weaves, and that Earth was but a pale blue dot set in
the vastness of space.
NASA scientists believe that Voyager 1 reached a goal without precedent
interstellar space, the uncharted sea beyond the planets, the realm of starson
August 25, 2012. The spacecraft had far outstripped Voyager 2, which trailed its
twin by more than 300 million miles (483 million kilometers).
Until Voyager 1's feat, "all spacecraft, everything, all the planets, had been
immersed in the solar wind, the wind from the sun," says Ed Stone, the rangy, 78year-old Caltech professor who has headed the Voyager 1 and 2 science team for its
entire 37 years of space exploration.
Voyager 1 found a distinct change of neighborhood in interstellar space, where
ashes from long-vanished stars float every three or so inches. It was an environment
with more particles than the solar wind, the stream of charged particles forever
racing off the sun's surface and into space.
Traveling more than 38,000 miles per hour (61,000 kilometers per hour), Voyager 1
dashes through interstellar space now as easily as it plunged past the planets.
The spacecraft sends staccato messages via radio waves that take more than 17
hours to find their way home.
All told, Voyager 1 has traveled an arc of more than 16 billion miles (26 billion
kilometers), past Jupiter's moons and Saturn's gleaming rings. Voyager 2 has sailed
nearly as far and has visited Uranus and Neptune as well. No other spacecraft have
revealed the secrets of so many worlds, roamed so far, or so profoundly reshaped
our view of our home in the cosmos.
Both vessels carry a copy of the "golden record," a 12-inch (30-centimeter), goldplated copper disk that is meant to act as a kind of Rosetta Stone for any
extraterrestrials seeking to understand life on Earth.

Behind the disk is a phonograph record containing sounds and images from Earth in
the era of Saturday Night Live and Star Wars. "We were very lucky," Stone says.
"Nature gave us a very nice solar system to explore."
Luckor perhaps the serendipity of exploration, to be more exacthad indeed a lot
to do with it.