Artist concept of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
För första gången har ett människotillverkat föremål tagit sig utanför den så kallade heliosfären:
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.”
Heliosfären sträcker sig minst 13 miljarder kilometer bortom planeterna i vårt solsystem. Voyager-1 har därmed slutligen lämnat Vintergatan, den galax som jorden befinner sig i. I mars konstaterade Nasa forskare att Voyager 1 inte lämnat Vintergatan ännu:
”The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. ”It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space.
Intressant?
Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om Into the void, Voyager, Voyager 1, NASA, Rymden, Utforskning, Rymdforskning, Heliosfär, Black Sabbath