Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to study the outer planets of our solar system. Its only goal was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. After making a series of discoveries there, like active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, and intricacies of Saturn's rings, the voyager's mission was extended.
Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune and is still the only spacecraft to have visited either of these two ice giant planets. Voyager 2 is now in its extended mission to study Interstellar Space and has been operating for 43 years as of 2021. It remains in touch through the NASA region Network.
Voyager 2 is that the fourth of 5 spacecraft to realize the Solar speed, which allowed it to go away from the system. In the year 2018, voyager 2 went around the sun’s influence boundary, thereby becoming the second spacecraft to enter interstellar space.
Ever since Voyager 2 has been bringing information about space that extends beyond our solar system.
The signal from Voyager 2 is still coming back, taking more than 16 hours to reach Earth. Its 22.4-watt transmitter features a power like a fridge light, which is quite a billion times dimmer by the time it reaches Earth and is picked up by Nasa’s largest antenna, a 70-meter dish.
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft came across something strange in interstellar space. The voyager found that the density of outer space is increasing which has challenged the earlier accepted fact about space being a vacuum.
Space is usually thought of as a vacuum, but it is not, not completely. The density of matter is extremely low, but it still exists. In the Solar System, the solar wind has an average proton and electron density of 3 to 10 particles per cubic centimeter, but it grows slower the farther out you go from the Sun.
The mean electron density of the interstellar medium in the Milky Way has been calculated to be around 0.07 particles per cubic centimeter. And the plasma density in the outer heliosphere is around 0.002 electrons per cubic centimeter.
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