NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey into Interstellar Space

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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. ...Voyager mission controllers still talk to or receive data from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 every day, though the emitted signals are currently very dim, at about 23 watts -- the power of a refrigerator light bulb. By the time the signals get to Earth, they are a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt.  ...“Voyager has boldly gone where no probe has gone before, marking one of the most significant technological achievements in the annals of the history of science, and adding a new chapter in human scientific dreams and endeavors,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science in Washington. “Perhaps some future deep space explorers will catch up with Voyager, our first interstellar envoy, and reflect on how this intrepid spacecraft helped enable their journey.”See also New York Times article, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/science/in-a-breathtaking-first-nasa-craft-exits-the-solar-system.html

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/september/nasa-spacecraft-embarks-on-historic-journey-into-interstellar-space/#.UjIacbyqE1g

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