NASA is Planning an Interstellar Mission that Could Last More than 100 Years

AnonTechie writes:

NASA is planning an interstellar mission that could last more than 100 years:

When the famous Voyager twin spacecraft left Earth in the 1970s, their mission was originally meant to last only five years. Although they're 14 billion and 11 billion miles, respectively, away from Earth, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are continuing to provide invaluable scientific data.

However, the Voyager twins can't go on forever. Scientists estimate that the last instruments onboard the spacecraft will shut down by 2031 at the latest, if some malfunction doesn't happen before then. This is why NASA wants a replacement - and this time, this new interstellar mission will be designed to run for a long time from the get-go. In fact, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) who have been tasked with designing the new mission, believe this Voyager successor could function for more than a century.

The new project, known as the Interstellar Probe, could launch sometime in the 2030s. It's meant to travel faster and farther than any man made object has and probably ever will in the foreseeable future. While still in the solar system, the plan is for the spacecraft to visit one or more of the 130 known dwarf planets in the outer reaches of the solar system. There are some clues that some of these icy worlds may have formed as ocean worlds.

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