LOS ANGELES — It's been 45 years since NASA's Voyager spacecraft blasted off from Earth, but the twin explorers still call home from billions of miles away.
"We do the 'Hello, are you OK?' call once a week," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the long-running mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.
The check-ins give Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 a chance to share their exact locations on the other side of the heliosphere, a distant region of the solar system whose magnetic field shields Earth and the other planets from galactic cosmic rays.
