Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun's influence and is now cruising 11.5 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.
And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.
Never before has a man-made object left the solar system as it is commonly understood.
"We made it," said an ecstatic Ed Stone, the mission's chief scientist, who waited decades for this moment.
NASA celebrated by playing the "Star Trek" theme at a news conference in Washington.
Voyager 1 actually made its exit more than a year ago, scientists said. But since there's no "Welcome to Interstellar Space" sign out there, NASA waited for more evidence before concluding that the probe had in fact broken out of the hot plasma bubble surrounding the planets.
Voyager 1, which is about the size of a small car, is drifting in a part of the universe littered with the remnants of ancient star explosions.
It will study exotic particles and other phenomena and will radio the data back to Earth, where the Voyager team awaits the starship's discoveries. It takes about 17 hours for its signal to reach Earth.
While Voyager 1 may have left the solar system as most people understand it, it still has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years to go before bidding adieu to the last icy bodies that make up our neighborhood.
At the rate it is going, it would take 40,000 years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
Voyager 1s odyssey began in 1977 when the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched on a tour of the solar system. Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to power itself past Pluto.
