Friday, September 13, 2013

NASA spacecraft embarks on historic journey into interstellar space


NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun. New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars.

Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.



"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004. Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft's interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years.


FOR MOBILE USERS!! are you tired of high rate of consumption of your data? WORRY NO MORE click the link below using your mobile browser (uc web or opera mini)

click the link below using your mobile browser (uc web or opera mini)
http://winksite.mobi/greaterheigh/veecubedmobi

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

if you don't have any ID please select "anonymous"

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home