Interstellar exploration: Voyager enters the solar system's final frontier
May 24, 2005 17: 37 EST
Last month, Pythom reported that Voyager 1 was flying faithfully on through an area known as the “termination shock.” At the time, it looked like Voyager would be penetrating the last layer of our solar system sometime in the next five years. Today, NASA reports that Voyager has entered the heliosheath, a region that is considered the final frontier of our solar system. The spacecraft is about 8.7 billion miles from the sun.
The edge of interstellar space
"Voyager has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space, as it begins exploring the solar system's final frontier," said Dr. Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology.
Pulling the plug on Voyager?
As Voyager heads into the great wide yonder, its future is uncertain. Not just because we don’t know what’s out there, but because NASA has suggested it might shut down the program by October, to transfer the current $4.2 million Voyager budget to President Bush's moon-Mars plans. According to the Planetary Society, “It's like Columbus seeing the shores of America and saying, 'Well, time to turn around and go home.'”
Launched in 1977 a few weeks apart, The Voyagers 1 and 2 are now heading out of the solar system, expected to continue to operate and send back data until at least the year 2020. Voyager 1 is now the furthest human-made object from the Sun.
For their original missions to Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyagers were destined for regions of space far from the Sun, so each was equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators to produce electrical power for the spacecraft systems and instruments. Still operating in remote, cold and dark conditions 27 years later, the Voyagers could last until 2020.
In November 2003, the Voyager team announced it was seeing events unlike any encountered before in the mission's then 26-year history. The team believed the unusual events indicated Voyager 1 was approaching a strange region of space, likely the beginning of this new frontier called the termination shock region.
The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars.
Image courtesy of NASA.
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