On this day · archive
Voyager crosses the Sun’s frontier
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space after decades in flight, carrying human instruments beyond the neighborhood shaped by the solar wind.
8
events in todayish file
2012
Voyager 1 becomes the first human-made object to enter interstellar space.
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space after decades in flight, carrying human instruments beyond the neighborhood shaped by the solar wind.
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first human-made object to cross beyond the heliosphere. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft reached that border after decades of travel.
The crossing did not announce itself with a photograph of a line. Scientists identified it through changing particles and magnetic conditions, reading the environment around a machine already far beyond the planets.
August 25 also holds a hurricane, political violence, a space telescope, a missing aircraft, and two chapters of twentieth-century politics. Voyager supplies the long horizon: an instrument continuing to report after its original planetary tour became history.
The full record
8 entries from the day’s archive, filed year by year with a note on what each one leaves behind.
Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a Category 4 storm.
Landfall began a prolonged flooding disaster across southeast Texas.
Disaster
Coordinated attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army kill 170 people in northern Rakhine State.
The attacks preceded a wider campaign of violence and mass displacement in the region.
Violence
Voyager 1 enters interstellar space, the first human-made object to do so.
The spacecraft crossed beyond the heliosphere after decades of travel.
Space
An arson attack by Los Zetas cartel members kills 52 people.
The casino fire in Monterrey placed civilians at the center of cartel violence.
Violence
NASA launches the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The infrared observatory opened a long view of cool and dust-obscured objects in space.
Space
Pakistan International Airlines Flight 404 disappears over the Himalayas with 54 people aboard.
The aircraft was never found, leaving families without wreckage or a final account.
Aviation
The House Un-American Activities Committee holds its first televised congressional hearing, confronting Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.
Television carried the bitter espionage dispute into American homes.
Politics
The Kuomintang is founded for the first time in Peking.
The party became a central institution in the political history of modern China and Taiwan.
Politics