Voyager 1 Sends Messages from the Edge

dalmozian writes "NASA's Latest News about the Voyager 1 is being run on Sci-Tech. The Voyager has passed into the border region at the edge of the solar system and now is sending back information about this never-before-explored area, say scientists at the University of Maryland. From the article: 'Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 are now part of a NASA Interstellar Mission to explore the outermost edge of the sun's domain and beyond. Both Voyagers are capable of returning scientific data from a full range of instruments, with adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to keep operating until 2020.'" The proof of crossing the termination shock was covered earlier this year but now we can see the actual data.

Comments

Re:Top 10 List

[Anonymous Coward]

5. You think that the slowdown of the Pioneer Space Probe is a more important mystery than the Pyramids.

Mystery no more?

Voyager's message to the extraterrestrials

[jzeejunk]

from TFA The Voyagers each carry a message to any extraterrestrials they might encounter. Each messages is carried by a phonograph record -- a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
To find out more about the message - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Re:Why are they cancelling funding...?

[nerdygeek]

Anomalous cosmic rays are particles accelerated at the termination shock. They are anomalous inasmuch as they have a different spectrum to the incredibly high energy cosmic rays that come from outside of the solar system. No-one knew what caused these particles originally so they were labelled "anomalous". In fact the unrolling of the spectrum of the ACRs was critical evidence that we had reached the TS. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say the energetic particles are "coming from somewhere else that we don't know"?

Whilst there's lots about the TS that is suprising and exciting and that we don't understand, it is not quite as mysterious as barawn makes out.

As for Voyager 2 - it has a fully working plasma instrument that will give direct measurements of the plasma temperature, density, pressure, flow speed and so on, something we didn't have for V1. Is was the lack of proper plasma measurements that led to some teams claming V1 had crossed the TS and then recanting these claims.

Re:i 0\/\/n0rZ t3h \/()j463r! woooot!

[Thanatopsis]

Yeah sure all we need is a deep space antenna and we will total own it. Oh yeah I don't have one of those.