= new reply since forum marked as read
Seriously though, this is very cool. Good Luck Voyager!!!!
"Escaped the sun's influence" is a misleading statement. As far as gravity goes, that is impossible.
Voyager 1 has moved past the Heliosphere. That isn't exactly the same as escaping the sun's influence.
Here is a slightly more literate article on the subject (although mixing kilometers and miles per hour makes no sense to me at all).
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/sci-tech/voyager-1-exits-solar-system-in-breathtaking-achievement-36-years-after-launch-20130913-2to2h.html
^snip^
The lonely probe, which is 18.8 billion kms from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 mph, has long been on the verge of bursting through the heliosphere, a vast, bullet-shaped bubble of particles blown out by the sun. Scientists have spent this year debating whether it had done so, interpreting the data Voyager sent back in different ways.
But now it is official that Voyager 1 passed into the cold, dark and unknown vastness of interstellar space, a place full of dust, plasma and other matter from exploded stars. The article in Science pinpointed a date: August 25, 2012.
"This is the moment we've all been waiting for," Jia-Rui Cook, the media liaison at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. "I can't even sleep it's so exciting!"
Go Voyager!!!!!
We are now an interstellar species, insofar at least that we've sent an LP player to the stars.
We're like galactic hipsters.
I remember Carl Sagan talking about the album on Cosmos.
I also remember how certain people got mad that the Pioneer probes contained "porn"--- because they contained pictograms of a naked man and woman.
... the more things change, I guess. 
It's positively Putinesque!
Echo I, America's answer to Sputnik.
On a side note, the stamp, which was issued less than 2 years after the Cuban Revolution, somehow omits Cuba from the map!
Thank you Carl...
