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Voyager 2 Set to Reach Termination Shock
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "A computer model simulation developed at UC Riverside has predicted that in late 2007 to early 2008, the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the termination shock, the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. At the termination shock, located at 7-8.5 billion miles from the sun, the solar wind is decelerated to less than the speed of sound. The boundary of the termination shock is not fixed, however, but wobbly, fluctuating in both time and distance from the sun, depending on solar activity. Because of this fluctuation, the spacecraft is also predicted to cross the boundary again in middle 2008. The article abstract is available from The Astrophysical Journal."
this is the kind of thing scientists predict all the time and observe in lab experiments... but this device is actually GOING to the edge of a solar system... it's someplace human made instruments haven't been. Science at it's very purest form, simply going and observing something nobody has actually seen before.
Why do you go on vacation to foreign places.. aren't postcards and Discovery channel good enough? It's a whole lot different to say "we were there" than guessing what it would be like from a long distance.
Once to get outside the boundary, twice if the boundary expands and catches back up with it, and thrice to once again get outside the boundary.
Just a thought.
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That's garbage. Space is not a total vacuum, it's true. However, the density of particles of matter in space is, for the most part, so low that space can be treated as a vacuum. It's like rounding 0.1xE-25 to just 0.
And as for the whole thing about sound travelling faster in space, you just made that up. Light (and other electromagnetic phenomena) do travel faster in a vacuum like space (perhaps you've confused the two). Sound, however, is caused waves of physical compression. In other words, one particle bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on. Sound travels faster and farther through more solid materials. It has a certain speed and a certain distance it will travel in air, a faster speed and greater distance in water, and an even faster speed and greater distance through concrete. It has no speed or distance at all in space, because what little matter there is isn't close enough to touch the next peice of matter, and you can't set up the compression wave.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
No. It will have very little effect on the actual spacecraft itself. However it will provide invaluable data (being only the second instrument ever to make in situ measurements there) to confirm and help update our models.
No matter what happens, it can't negatively affect the mission, because it is the mission. (well part of the mission, anyway) As a useless analogy, if Space Aliens came down and ray-gunned all of SETI's equipment, you wouldn't say that SETI's mission would be negatively impacted, would you?
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