Thursday, September 12, 2013

New Frontier Reached!

NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey into Interstellar Space 

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun. New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science. "Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are." Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004.


Monday, September 9, 2013

Friday, September 6, 2013

August 2013 Solar Wind & Space Weather From STEREO Ahead & Behind HI1

Looking back at August, 2013 From this big picture view of HI1 you can see solar wind makes it all the way to earth. That other planet that glides by in the beginning is Mercury.