SETIsLady
05-30-2005, 11:28 AM
After a storied, 28-year odyssey, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft appears to have reached the edge of the solar system, a turbulent zone of near-nothingness where the solar wind begins to give way to interstellar space in a cosmic cataclysm known as "termination shock," scientists said this week.
"This is an historic step in Voyager's race," said California Institute of Technology physicist Edward Stone, the mission's chief scientist since Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in summer 1977. "We have a totally new region of space to explore, and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
Stone said project scientists, working from models of a phenomenon never before directly observed, finally agreed that data from Voyager 1's tiny 80-kilobyte computer memory showed that the spacecraft had passed through termination shock to the "heliosheath," a frontier of unknown thickness that defines the border with interstellar space
Full Story (http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0528voyager28.html)
"This is an historic step in Voyager's race," said California Institute of Technology physicist Edward Stone, the mission's chief scientist since Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in summer 1977. "We have a totally new region of space to explore, and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
Stone said project scientists, working from models of a phenomenon never before directly observed, finally agreed that data from Voyager 1's tiny 80-kilobyte computer memory showed that the spacecraft had passed through termination shock to the "heliosheath," a frontier of unknown thickness that defines the border with interstellar space
Full Story (http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0528voyager28.html)