“I don’t think it’s a certainty Voyager is outside now,” space physicist David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas told Science magazine.
“It may well have crossed,” he said. “But without a magnetic field direction change, I don’t know what to make of it.”
The spacecraft is expected to keep cruising, though the radioisotope thermo electric generators that power it are beginning to run down.
Voyager’s instruments will have to shut down permanently in 2025, Science reported. However, experts say the spacecraft may keep traveling indefinitely.
NASA said the total cost of the twin Voyager missions has been $988 million dollars, including launch, mission operations and the spacecraft’s nuclear batteries.
“Even though it took 36 years, it’s just an amazing thing to me,” said co author Bill Kurth, of the University of Iowa.
“I think the Voyager mission is a much grander voyage of humankind than anyone had dreamed.”
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