More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA's twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they're still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling. The message is, "Expect the unexpected."
"It's uncanny," says Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Voyager Project Scientist since 1972. "Voyager 1 and 2 have a knack for making discoveries." Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished--and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of interstellar space in our Milky Way galaxy.
In which direction is the sun's stream of charged particles banking when it nears the edge of the solar system? The answer, scientists know, is blowing in the wind. It's just a matter of getting NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft in the right orientation to detect it.
To enable Voyager 1's Low Energy Charged Particle instrument to gather these data, the spacecraft performed a maneuver on March 7 that it hadn't done for 21 years, except in a preparatory test last month.At 9:10 a.m. PST (12:10 p.m. EST), humanity's most distant spacecraft rolled 70 degrees counterclockwise as seen from Earth from its normal orientation and held the position by spinning gyroscopes for two hours, 33 minutes.
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The end of the space shuttle’s service life lies nigh before us. There’s no surprise then that reviews are coming out as with Robert Adamcik’s “Voyages of Discovery: The Missions of United States Space Shuttle Discovery (OV-103) 1984-2011“. This book’s faithful compilation of the shuttle, mission by mission, reminds us that we are a successful space faring species with high potential.
Billed as the first production orbiter, Discovery was optimized to haul cargo from the Earth’s surface up to low Earth orbit. Its somewhat extended 5 year build time from about 1979 to 1984 was followed up with 27 years of service. During its operational time, the shuttle will have flown to orbit a total of 39 times. The future tense is appropriate as the shuttle awaits it final flight in early 2011.
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Since 2004, the unmanned probe has been exploring a region of space where solar wind a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million miles per hour slows abruptly and crashes into the thin gas between stars.
NASA said Monday that recent readings show the average outward speed of the solar wind has slowed to zero, meaning the spacecraft is nearing ever closer to the solar system's edge to a boundary known as the heliopause."It's telling us the heliopause is not too far ahead," said project scientist Edward Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Full Article
