Voyager Spacecraft is Near Solar System’s Edge
December 15th, 2010 - 12:04 am ICT by Angela Kaye MasonDec 14 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The Voyager 1 Spacecraft, a long time part of the NASA space program is rushing toward the edge of our solar system. On Monday, NASA announced that recent reading indicate that the average outward speed of the solar wind is now at almost zero, and this means that the Voyager is much closer to the edge of the solar system, which is known as the heliopause.
The unmanned space probe has been in explorations of the region of space where the solar wind slows and crashes into the thin gas layers which is between the stars. The solar wind is a stream of particles which are charged, come spewing out of the sun at one million miles an hour.
Since the Voyager’s readings show that the solar winds have slowed, Edward Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory states that this means that the heliopause is not too far ahead. Before getting to excited by this news, one must realise that scientists still estimate it will take at least four more years before the Voyager probe will completely leave the solar system and make it into interstellar space.
This is the first milestone since June, when the scientists noticed that the speeds of the solar winds had began to match that of the spacecraft. They measured for several months just to be sure it was not just a variation of wind gusts, bu there were no changes. The Voyager 1 first took flight in 1977, and is now about 10.8 billion miles from the sun.
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