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Voyagers Legacy in Pictures
tanveer1979 writes "Space.com has an interesting photo feature from the voyager craft. For the uninformed voyager is the most distant man made object. For the first time we are recieving photos of distant parts of the solar system.
Currently voyager is about 12 light hours away. Wonder how far is that? Well Sun is 8 light minutes away from Earth. In case you are wondering what is this all about, check out the current location of voyager. The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause, which is the limit of the rule of the sun, after which inter steller winds take over, and for the first time scientists can get the feel of what lies outside the solar system."
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/
It's not much, just 10 pictures. Click on "Voyager's Photo Legacy", then again for a Javascript pop-up gallery.
- More, higher resolution pictures
- Detailed timeline
- A 2 minute NPR segment
- A longer segment at the end of Science News Roundup on NPR
And a few newspaper stories:From the comment field in the GIF file (can you write such long comments into the GIF file using Photoshop?):
NASA's Voyager 2 took this photograph of Saturn on July 21, 1981,
when the spacecraft was 33.9 million kÿilometers (21 million
miles) from the planet. Two bright, presumably convective cloud
patterns are visible in the mid-northern hemisphere and several
dark spoke-like features can be seen in the broad B-ring (left of
planet). The moons Rhea and dioneÿ appear as blue dots to the
south and southeast of Saturn, respectively. Voyager 2 made its
closest approach to Saturn on Aug. 25, 1981. The Voyager project
is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif. This image was converted directly from digital data to
GIF format.
(Unfortunately, the Slashdot "filter" doesn't allow me to post the whole comment.)
Daniel
The heliopause is the limit of the sun's contribution to particle flux. The sun spews out a constant flow of particles of various kinds, called the solar wind. As you go out, they naturally get more and more sparse.
At the same time, there are a certain number of particles just flying around free in space, with a (very roughly) uniform density all over the universe.
The heliopause marks the points where the density of solar particles has declined to that of the free-space particles. Inside it, most of the particles you see are from the sun; outside it, most of them come from elsewhere.
The solar gravity does indeed reach farther. The Oort Cloud is made up of objects so far out that while they're basically orbiting the sun, they're also affected by the gravity of other stars in the "neighborhood". Once in a while this disturbs one of them enough that it falls into the inner solar system and we get a comet.
rj
In the mid 80's I remember walking by the newstand, and suddenly seeing a picture of a big, blue/green spooky looking planet on the front page. Then right next to it was "Voyager Reaches Neptune!".
I remember the space books before that simply showed grainy star-like blob photos of neptune (assuming no guessed illustration).
Then low and behold, this big spooky ball with wispy clouds and a jupiter-like dark spot is revealed, and its a real place, waaaaaay out there at the cold edge of the solar system.
It fit well the stereotype of a distant, strange, lonely, but beautiful planet.
Thumbs up, Voy!
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, it's a matter of speed. Pioneer 10 was for a long time the furtherest man-made object, but Voyager 2 passed it about 10 years ago or so. The Pioneer's were launched with less powerful rockets and didn't use as much gravitational slingshot. Voyager 1 and 2 are simply faster.