Voyager 1 Reaches Interstellar Space, a Milestone for Human Exploration

More than 11.6 billion miles away from Earth, NASA's Voyager 1 has finally reached interstellar space, scientists confirmed Thursday.

"It's clearly a major milestone in the history of exploration — there's no doubt about that," Edward Stone, Voyager 1 project scientist, told Mashable Tuesday. "This is sort of like the first circumnavigation of the globe or the first footprints on the moon."

Stone and his team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Voyager 1 into space 36 years ago at a time when the space agency relied on paper, chalkboards and raw computational genius to build spacecrafts. There was so much room for error — and yet Voyager 1 is arguably one of NASA's most successful missions and most certainly the biggest bang for its buck. Read more...