RSSVoyager Nears Edge of Interstellar Space
By Ed Oswald and Nate Mook | Published May 27, 2005, 11:51 AM
Scientists this week say the Voyager 1 space probe, launched in 1977, has reached the end of our solar system after going through an area known as "termination shock" and is entering the heliosheath.
The termination shock is a region where the solar winds from the sun slow abruptly from a speed of up to 1.5 million miles per hour due to pressure from gas between the stars. The exact location of this region is unknown since it can expand or contract based on the pressure of the solar wind.
"The consensus of the team now is that Voyager 1, at 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, has at last entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock," said Dr. John Richardson from MIT, Principal Investigator of the Voyager plasma science investigation.
Voyager 1 first observed magnetic field strength increasing by a factor of two and a half in December 2004, which is expected when solar wind slows down. From December until now, the field stengh remained at these high levels.
"Voyager's observations over the past few years show that the termination shock is far more complicated than anyone thought," said Dr. Eric Christian, Discipline Scientist for the Sun-Solar System Connection research program at NASA.
After completing it's original mission of exploring Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 and its twin probe Voyager 2 are now being used to explore the outermost regions of the solar system.
It is quite possible that before the probes go dark sometime around 2020, humans may have their first glimpses into interstellar space.
I dont get it
They can manage to send a spacecraft deep in space but still cannot rectify this stupid WINDOWS that keeps on crashing.
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|I wonder if it really will die off in 2020...
it's also interesting that it hasn't been hit by any objects in space...
If it was an apple it would have a nice "girly-man" design lol :-)
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|Wow, you can bet Voyager isnt running WINDOWS if it's still going! Maybe it was an Apple beta.. maybe thats why it's on Beta News!! ;)
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|At the risk of sounding like Spock... I find this-- fascinating.
And yet, I'm not sure what it has to do with "Beta News". Hmm. I suppose it could be that Voyager is the beta of our space program, but if that's the case, I think our later builds have suffered in reliability and performance.
On another note--- look at all the pictures Voyager takes... Ever notice how space shots in real life AND sci-fi pics never show you all the junk that's floating around in Earth's orbit? Earth is the redneck's front yard of the universe. *sigh*
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|Uh....Voyager doesn't take pictures of earth.
AND, if I threw 10,000 pieces of trash in the Pacific Ocean, you wouldn't be able to tell. In fact, most random shots of the ocean wouldn't show any of the trash. Now imagine 10,000 pieces of trash floating around something 5 times bigger than the pacific ocean. They won't show up on pictures either.
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|What no one mentions is the reason these spacecrafts are still going in the deep cold and dark of space: they are nuclear- powered. Kindly keep that in mind as NASA elicits public opinions for its Promethius project.
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|I read this like 3 or 4 days ago and it just made it here?
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|I wonder exactly what computer hardware voyager is running, probobly like a z80 with a custom version of unix ;)
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|mjm01010101, you might want to read up on the Russian moon rover Lunokhod-1, launched seven years before Voyager. It was designed to operate for only 90 days but actually toured the moon for 11 months. So do I think NASA had the technology build a rover in 1977 when Russia did it in 1970? Of course!
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|What? Man have I been asleep the past decade or so? I had no idea the Voyager 1 still existed. Technology is growing fast, but man, the stability of computers just ain't what it used to be...
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|I like that the stuff that was built for space in 1977 seems to work better than the stuff we build today.
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|You think in 1977 they had the tech to build two rovers, have them land on mars and work pretty much with little flaw and exceed all mission expectations and still operational over a year after landing?
I thought not.
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|Yea. Thats back when NASA had money to do crap though. The old saying "you get what you pay for" means a hell of alot in the space program.
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|Definitely not, I was being sarcastic. There have been many cases where things have worked great, and many cases where things have failed but the backup systems have taken over. Its just that every once in a while you read things like "it turns out that the break gears were installed backwards in the space shuttle and no one noticed for years" or "yeah, one team was using metric and one was using american standard". We're doing insanely more complex things now so we're opening doors for more problems. Its the same as how there were relatively few viruses in the 70's compared to now - as we create more technology, we create more possible problems.
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|Well said
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|GO VGER GO
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|As the late and much missed Carl Sagan (a great,refreshing mind who did not dote on such mondane controversies as " Is Netscape 8.00 really ruining IE 6.00" would say " Voyager is heading into the unknown, among the billions and billions of star systems ". Wll it find anything?. None of us will be alive. if it does. As Spock would say " may it live long and prosper" In a world of turmoil we need Such positive news. I must congratulate Beta News for including this uplifting story in their site. One becomes weary of annoyances regarding Microsoft.
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|yes they did they just didnt have political support or funding
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