NASA’s Voyagers 1 and 2, out in the solar system’s dark boondocks 30 years after their launches, are still expanding knowledge of space.
Voyager 2 recently broke through the edge of the bubble of solar wind that radiates from our sun, where the transition to interstellar space begins.
By crashing this turbulent border, known as the solar wind termination shock, while nearly 1 billion miles closer to the sun than where Voyager 1 struck it, mission scientists say Voyager 2 showed this solar-wind bubble — the heliosphere — is irregularly shaped.
This border shock area is formed when the solar wind is abruptly slowed by pressure from the gas and magnetic field of interstellar space, according to University of Arizona scientist J. Randy Jokipii, a Voyager science team member and Regents’ professor.
The twin spacecraft, launched in the summer of 1977, are many billions of miles apart.
The area between the solar system’s bubble and true interstellar space may take 10 years to cross, according to Jokipii.
Jokipii was one of several Voyager science team members who made presentations on Voyager 2’s most recent data earlier this week at the 2007 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
Team members said Voyager 2’s instruments showed that it crossed the shock area several times, proving the edge “sloshes” back and forth, like surf on the beach.
Voyager 2 is so far out, long past Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune — even ex-planet Pluto — that its radioed datagrams to scientists back on Earth take more than 13 hours to get here.
As the plutonium in the spacecrafts’ nuclear-power generators degrades, they produce less power, and equipment has been turned off.
The Voyagers are expected to function and send back data from their reduced instrumentation until 2020, well over 40 years after they were launched.
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