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Showing posts from September, 2013

NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey into Interstellar Space

Source:   Jia-Rui C. Cook ,  NASA Press Rrelease 13-280  Excerpt: 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. ...Traveling at the speed of light, a signal from Voyager 1 takes about 17 hours to travel to Earth. ...Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars.  ...A coronal mass ejection, or a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields, that erupted from the sun in March 2012 provided scientists the data they needed ...eventually arrived at Voyager 1's location 13 months later.... On April 9 [2013], Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the movement. ...the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space