NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has performed a rare acrobatic maneuver to help scientists study the edge of the solar system. On Monday this week, the probe rolled 70 degrees anticlockwise as seen from Earth and held the position for two hours and 33 minutes using its gyroscopes.

The last time Voyager 1 performed such a maneuver was in 1990, when it turned to photograph the planets it was leaving behind.

The roll is designed to let the spacecraft’s Low Energy Charged Particle instrument investigate what is happening around it. The instrument counts particles and measures their direction.

Voyager 1 has found that the solar wind at its location has slowed to zero. The wind is starting to turn back on itself as it pushes up against particles from interstellar space, near the boundary scientists call the heliopause.

Voyager 1 is now about 17 billion kilometres from Earth. A radio message takes 16 hours to travel one way between Earth and the probe.

The spacecraft will perform more rolls this week, and mission managers plan weekly rolls to gather particle data every three months if the probe keeps working well.