Voyager 1 reaches interstellar space�

Though it won't be regarded as such - this is one of humanities greatest achievements ~ simply amazing.
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Voyager 1 reaches solar system's final frontier

NASA's Voyager 1 has reached the final frontier of our solar system, having traveled through a turbulent place where electrically charged particles from the Sun crash into thin gas from interstellar space.

Astronomers tracking the little spaceship's 26-year journey from Earth believe Voyager 1 has gone through a region known as termination shock, some 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, and entered an area called the heliosheath.

"Voyager 1 has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space," Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement released Tuesday.

Voyager watchers theorized last November that the craft might be reaching this bumpy region of space when the charged solar particles known as the solar wind seemed to slow down from a top speed of 1.5 million miles per hour.

This was expected at the area of termination shock, where the solar winds were expected to decelerate as they bump up against gas from the space beyond our solar system. It is more than twice as distant as Pluto, the furthest planet in our system.

By monitoring the craft's speed and the increase in the force of the solar wind, Voyager scientists now believe the craft has made it through the shock and into the heliosheath.

Predicting the location of the termination shock was hard because the precise conditions in interstellar space are unknown and the termination shock can expand, contract and ripple, depending on changes in the speed and pressure of the solar wind.

"Voyager's observations over the past few years show the termination shock is far more complicated than anyone thought," said Eric Christian, a scientist with NASA's Sun-Solar System Connection program.

Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. The pair kept going, however, and the mission was extended.

Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, the only spacecraft to have visited these outer planets. Both Voyagers are now part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission to explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain.

Both Voyagers are capable of returning scientific data from a full range of instruments, with adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to keep operating until 2020.

Wherever they go, the Voyagers each carry a golden phonograph record which bears messages from Earth, including natural sounds of surf, wind, thunder and animals. There are also musical selections, spoken greetings in 55 languages, along with instructions and equipment on how to play the record.

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"It is more than twice as distant as Pluto, the furthest planet in our system."

Voyager is far beyond Pluto.

 

The gold record on Voyager is an interesting story unto itself...
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I've always been fascinated with the Voyager Interstellar Record, perhaps because it's somewhat similar to a CED in being a grooved record containing nearly two hours of analog recordings of images and sounds of Earth. But the Voyager record is not a CED, as all the information on the disc is recorded in the audio frequency range, and the disc is designed to spin at only 16 2/3 RPM requiring 12 seconds to play back a color image.

This might superficially sound like the metal-plated CED's RCA was still experimenting with when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched in 1977, but those early CED's only played 1 hour per disc, and the metal coating was aluminum, with the CED base material still being plastic. The Voyager records are actually gold-plated copper mothers of regular 33 RPM audio LP's, designed to spin at half speed to double the play back time with a slight loss in fidelity. This is similar to the production process used for CED's, wherein positive mothers were used to make negative stampers, which were then used to press the consumer discs. The Voyager discs were left in the form of metal mothers for the sake of longevity, estimated to be a billion years or more in the near vacuum of interstellar space. This is a good thing, as it's going to be at least 60,000 years before either of the Voyager spacecraft even come close to another star.

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It would be a real travesty if funding were cut to this program at this stage of its life.
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...Stamatios Krimigis, another longtime Voyager scientist, said that the spacecraft may remain in the heliosheath for perhaps 10 years but should easily survive, going dark only when its plutonium power source finally expires around 2020.

Of far greater concern to scientists was the possibility that NASA could kill the $4.2 million-a-year project to free up money for President Bush's initiative to send humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars.

NASA has put Voyager's fate on hold while independent reviewers evaluate the mission, with a decision expected in February. "We're very excited," Krimigis said of the latest findings. "We hope NASA will reconsider, and we're confident they will."

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