The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Space => Topic started by: Elderberry on December 11, 2018, 01:21:37 am
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Space News by Jeff Foust — December 10, 2018
As NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft enters interstellar space, project officials have high hopes that it and its twin spacecraft will continue to operate for as long as a decade.
NASA announced Dec. 10 that Voyager 2 passed what is known as the heliopause, the boundary between where the solar wind from the sun dominates and where the interstellar medium is dominant. That crossing, around Nov. 5, was detected by Voyager 2 in the form of a sharp drop in solar wind particles and corresponding increase in galactic cosmic rays detected by the spacecraft’s instruments.
The discovery, announced at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union here, comes six years after Voyager 1 also crossed the heliopause into interstellar space.
“This is a very exciting time again in Voyager’s 41-year journey,†said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at Caltech and former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a press conference announcing the discovery.
More: https://spacenews.com/voyager-2-enters-interstellar-space/ (https://spacenews.com/voyager-2-enters-interstellar-space/)
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Yay!!!!
Ping
@kevindavis
@Suppressed
@Hopalong Ginsberg
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Awesome!
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Built with early 1970s technology.
The probe transmits data at 160 bits per second.
My reply to this article would take about 10 seconds to transmit from Voyager 2
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For comparison, according to this article (https://futurism.com/will-new-horizons-leave-solar-system-long-can-survive) the probe New Horizons, which flew by Pluto in July, 2015, is expected to reach the heliopause around the year 2040.
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(https://i.imgflip.com/v463s.jpg)