What are the names of the two spacecraft?

Question

Two spacecraft have now traveled into deep space beyond our solar system. What are their names?

Answer 1

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

The Voyager program consists of a pair of unmanned scientific probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment of the late 1970s. Although they were officially designated to study just Jupiter and Saturn, the two probes were able to continue their mission into the outer solar system. They have since continued out and will one day exit the solar system. These probes were built at JPL and were funded by NASA.

Both missions have gathered large amounts of data about the gas giants of the solar system, of which little was previously known. In addition, the spacecraft trajectories have been used to place limits on the existence of a hypothetical post-Plutonian Planet X.

Both Voyager probes have far outlasted their originally intended lifespan. Each is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are now expected to continue to generate enough power to let the probes keep communicating with Earth until at least the year 2025.

As of May 9, 2008, Voyager 1 is over 15.89 terameters (15.89×1012 meters, or 15.89×109 km, 106.26 AU, 14.72 light-hours, or 9.87 billion miles) from the Sun, and has thus entered the heliosheath, the termination shock region between the solar system and interstellar space, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to the other bodies in the galaxy. If Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally passes the heliopause, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium. At this distance, signals from Voyager 1 take more than fourteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

As of May 9, 2008, Voyager 2 is at a distance of around 85.84 AU (approximately 12.842 terameters) from the Sun, deep in the scattered disc, and traveling outward at roughly 3.28 AUs per year.

Along with Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 2, and New Horizons, Voyager 1 is an interstellar probe.

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Well they will both stop working in 2025 when they run out of power.  Right now Voyager 1 is at 106.4 AU moving at 3.6 AU per year so you can calculate how far it will be before it runs out of juice.  At that point it should be outside the bounds of the Solar System.  It could take a picture but it would mainly only the sun looking like a normal star.  Most of the planets would be very hard to see at that distance.

Voyager 2 is at 85.84 AU and moving at 3.28 AUs per year so it won't be as far away when it runs out of power.

Answer 2

I believe the spacecraft you are thinking of are Voyager 1  and Voyager 2.  Both of which have gone beyond the known boundaries of our solar system.

Answer 3

The Enterprise and the Millenium Falcon.

The idea that the Voyager probes can send pictures back from outside the Milky Way is pretty far fetched.

Answer 4

There are actually 4, with at one more on the way.

http://www.heavens-above.com/solar-escap...

The first two are the American Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 Probes

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/pionee...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10

They were part of the Pioneer series of projects, but the other ones did not involve leaving the solar system.

The second two were the American Voyager Probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They are going faster than the Pioneer Probes, so even though the Pioneer's had a long head start, the Voyager's are now farther out.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/miss...

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_pro...

Voyager 1:

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in the universe, At the beginning of 2005, the spacecraft was about 94 times as far from the Sun as is Earth. It was deflected northward above the plane of the planets' orbits when it swung by Saturn in 1980 and is now speeding outward from the Sun at nearly one million miles per day, a rate that would take it from Los Angeles to New York in less than four minutes. Long-lived nuclear batteries are expected to provide electrical power until at least 2020 when Voyager 1 will be more than 13 billion miles from Earth and may have reached interstellar space.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/sola...

The last one is the American New Horizons Probe to Pluto. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhor...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizon...

It has not left the Solar System, it is just beyond the orbit of Saturn. It's mission is to do a fast flyby of Pluto. As a consequence of this, it will escape the Solary System.

The two Pioneer's each carry a plaque, put there "just in case" some alien race were to find it some day.  It was put on at the last minute, so it is just a plaque, nothing more sophisticated than that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_pla...

The two Voyager Probes each carry a "golden record"...it is a record album (remember they were launched in the 1970's) with needle, upon which are encoded various pictures and sound of Earth, along with greetings in several languages, and a selection of music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Gol...

Since the odds of being found are so astronomically small, and the budget was so tight, New Horizons has no such device, although there was a disc where people could list their names, that was taken along.

Edit...with regards to your question about a photo of the Solar System...it's been done.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery...

After Voyager 2 had its encounter with Neptune, the Voyager project turned the cameras of Voyager 1 (whose camera had been dormant since Saturn) back on where the two spacecraft had come from and took the images on this page.

They waited till the very, very, very, very end of the mission because they were afraid that the sun might burn out the camera if an error was made and the camera was pointed at the sun for too long.