Voyager 1 on verge of the other side

PASADENA, CALIF. - Thirty-five years after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is reaching for the stars.

Sooner or later, the workhorse spacecraft will bid adieu to the solar system and enter a new realm of space -- the first time a manmade object will have escaped to the other side.

Perhaps no one on Earth will relish the moment more than Ed Stone, 76, who has toiled on the project from the start: "We're anxious to get outside and find what's out there."

When NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 rocketed out of Earth's grip in 1977, no one knew how long they would live. Now, they are the longest-operating spacecraft in history and the most distant, at billions of miles from Earth but in different directions.

Wednesday marks the 35th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch to Jupiter and Saturn. It is now flitting around the fringes of the solar system, which is enveloped in a giant plasma bubble. This hot and turbulent area is created by a stream of charged particles from the sun.

Outside the bubble is a new frontier in the Milky Way -- the space between stars. Once Voyager 1 plows through, scientists expect a calmer environment by comparison.

When that will happen is anyone's guess. Voyager 1 is in uncharted territory. One thing is clear: The boundary that separates the solar system and interstellar space is near, but it could take days, months or years to cross that milestone.

They're still ticking despite being relics of the early Space Age. Each has only 68 kilobytes of computer memory. To put that in perspective, the smallest iPod -- an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano -- is 100,000 times more powerful.

The Voyagers' original goal was to tour Jupiter and Saturn, and they sent back postcards of Jupiter's big red spot and Saturn's glittery rings. They also beamed home a torrent of discoveries: erupting volcanoes on Jupiter's moon of Io; hints of an ocean below the icy surface of the Jupiter moon Europa; signs of methane rain on Saturn's moon of Titan.

Voyager 2 then journeyed to Uranus and Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to fly by these two outer planets. Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to catapult itself toward the edge of the solar system.

These days, a handful of engineers diligently listen for the Voyagers from a satellite campus not far from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built the spacecraft.

There are no full-time scientists left on the mission, but 20 part-timers analyze the data streamed back. Since the spacecraft are so far out, it takes 17 hours for a radio signal from Voyager 1 to travel to Earth.