To boldly go

IN THE LAST DECADE, the notion of interstellar travel went from fiction to reality. In 2012, after 35 years of interplanetary travel across 122 astronomical units, Voyager 1 left the Ssolar System and crossed into interstellar space. In 2018, Voyager 2 did the same.

But the only other transmitting spacecraft on a trajectory to interstellar space, New Horizons, is not even halfway there. The scientific community’s tenuous connection to this unexplored region therefore depends on the 44-year-old Voyagers staying alive or the New