NASA's famous Voyager 1 space probe, sailing outwards into the interstellar void far beyond the orbit of Pluto, has entered a new and never-before-seen region of space thought to be the very edge of the "bubble" maintained around the solar system by the power of the Sun.

"We shouldn't have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like," enthuses Ed Stone, Voyager project boffin.
The probe has been encountering strange, previously unseen phenomena in recent times as it comes to the true edge of the solar system, where the "wind" of particles blowing out from the Sun is no longer steady - and sometimes is overcome by the cosmic winds of the wider galaxy, actually gusting back on the outward-bound probecraft.

"Voyager tells us now that we're in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system," says Stone.

I find it astonishing that it's still going strong, 34 years after it's launch.

Why can't NASA make home goods?

I've been through several fridges, washing machines, computers and TVs in that period. Why can't NASA make home goods?

The Voyagers' data links deliver upload rates of 16 bits/second, and download at 160 bits/sec (or 1.4 kbps for high-rate plasma data). When out of communication with Earth, the probes store information on an 8-track digital tape recorder.

Because nobody wants to pay £3million for a fridge?