Voyager 1 Crosses The Termination Shock

SubstormGuy writes "In a scientific session at the AGU meeting in New Orleans this morning, Dr. Ed Stone presented clear evidence that Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock last December. The scientists in the room applauded when the announcement was made."

2005 is shaping up to be quite the year!

[uptownguy]

I am shocked I say -- SHOCKED -- to hear this news.

And excited.

The geek in me is excited about 2005. Methane oceans, rovers on Mars and private spaceflight? There's a lot that's scary going on in the world today. But when it comes to SPACEFLIGHT -- 2005 is shaping up to be a banner year!

Kudos to the Voyager team!

Woohooo!

[Fjornir]

Worlds grow old and suns grow cold
And death we never can doubt.
Time's cold wind, wailing down the past,
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

Cycles turn while the far stars burn,
And people and planets age.
Life's crown passes to younger lands,
Time brushes dust of hope from his hands
And turns another page.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

But we who feel the weight of the wheel
When winter falls over our world
Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes
To a silver moon in the opened skies
And a single flag unfurled.

But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

We know well what Life can tell:
If you would not perish, then grow.
And today our fragile flesh and steel
Have laid our hands on a vaster wheel
With all of the stars to know

That the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

From all who tried out of history's tide,
Salute for the team that won.
And the old Earth smiles at her children's reach,
The wave that carried us up the beach
To reach for the shining sun.

For the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.

(c) 1975 - Leslie Fish

details

[rhennigan]

Anyone care to give a better explanation of termination shock? How hot does it get there? Can the sensors onboard obtain more information of this phenomenon? The wikipedia article doesn't go into too much detail.

Re:That Voyager is out there

[Moocowsia]

So if the solarwinds are slower than supersonic speeds out there won't that be decelerating voyager considerably more than before it reached that point? I wonder if this ties in at all into voyager being slower than predicted?

Re:Uh... really old?

[darkpurpleblob]

The article hadn't been updated for a while with new information (you'll see it's changed quite a bit [wikipedia.org] since the /. post). There also appears to be some controversy about the topic. From Effects of a Tilted Heliospheric Current Sheet in the Heliosheath [agu.org]:

There is currently a controversy as to whether Voyager 1 has already crossed the Termination Shock, the first boundary of the Heliosphere (Krimigis et al. 2003; McDonald et al. 2003, Burlaga et al. 2003). An important aspect of this controversy is our poor understanding of this region.

Re:It happened ages ago?

[Vo0k]

/cygdrive/d/home>units
You have: 100 au
You want: light years
* 0.0015812845
/ 632.39726
You have: 0.0015812845 years * 2 /* there and back */
You want: hours
* 27.722488
/ 0.036071799

...and they want to cut funding?!?!

[mjsottile77]

Is anyone else frustrated when you hear wonderful science like this being done, yet see that probes like this are slated to have their funding cut (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/voyager1-05a.html [spacedaily.com]) ? For some reason, $4.2 million / year to operate them (ie, listen) seems unbelievably cheap for such a unique resource - not only are there only TWO probes out there (voyager 1 and 2), but to get others out to replace them would cost a whole ton more. ...In addition to having to wait another 20 or so years to get there.
Science just doesn't work when politics gets involved... :(

WTF?

[ChipMonk]

From the Wikipedia page:

It appears helioshock can also be caused by mating with fagolas.

Why do I get the queasy feeling that some GNAA asshat defaced yet another Wikipedia page? Stupid pissers.

Go ahead, mod me Flamebait. I don't care. I'm tired of these jerks.

Re:The particles slow down...

[william_w_bush]

the change in mag-flux is small, enough to slow down ionic particles, but not enough to seriously affect a massive and low-charge probe or ship. so kinda no.

also, the heliopause and termination shock is a very small effect. its a big deal to the solar wind, but to any uncharged object bigger than a small rock its near unnoticable.

Re:details

[downsize]

i'll say, who would have thought a 28 year old spacecraft would have made it that far without getting completely destroyed, but to cross 'the termination shock' as well!

it did read like NASA will not pull the plug, how could they possibly. is the heat from Bush really that bad? could not Bush's NASA advisors sway him that this is some incredible data discovery over wasting money to put people on Mars in 40+ years?

Re:details

[CroDragn]

I've noticed several uses of the term "supersonic" in relation to solar wind. Exactly how does this apply? Was under the impression that an atmosphere was a requirement for supersonic speeds.

Re:What does it look like?

[pxl8]

Another example pic is here

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031120.html [nasa.gov]

This really makes me

[el_womble]

envious of Americans. We 'foriegners' give you guys A LOT of crap over wars, the environment, religion, guns etc (not that the British have a leg to stand on... we forget our history way too quickly), but the fact is that we don't have the balls to do anything like this anymore. Creating an object that can travel out of the Solar System is HUGE. It is an achievement that should stand out as a moment in history that we can be truely proud of: no-one got killed, you're not doing it for greed or wealth - its a pure scientific achievement.

boundaries

[__aahlyu4518]

From wikipedia : "In astronomy, the termination shock is theorised to be a boundary marking one of the outer limits of the sun's influence."

How many outer limits does the sun have and what are they ?

Re:This really makes me

[Strontium-90]

On behalf of my fellow Americans, whether they like it or not, I'd just like to say thanks for your comment. Not that I had anything to do with Voyager or any other sattelites up there. In spite of some of the bad things we've done, I'm proud of my country (as I'm sure you are of yours), and I'm glad to see someone who doesn't judge all Americans based on a subset of our population.

Just like all countries, we do good things and we do bad things. We have good politicians and we have bad politicians. We have good people and we have bad people. So, thanks again for your levelheadedness, in all seriousness, I really do appreciate it.

Now that's space!

[master_p]

It is very irritating (for us geeks!) to say that humans have started space exploration. We have been raised on Star Trek and Star Wars...we can't accept having gone a few hundred kilometers up in the sky as "space". If we could take a trip to the place Voyager now is, then we can say that we have started exploring space. Until that day, we can't say anything. Here is an analogy with sea exploration: would we say that we have explored the Atlantic ocean, if the European explorers of the 15th century have just put their feet in a local lake? we wouldn't. Then how can we talk about "space age" and "space exploration"?

Re:Update wiki with new information

[bentcd]

Given that the only interesting sounds within a space fighter are your own engine hum and weapons discharging, it seems plausible that the UI designers will be looking to add sounds for external events. Modern aircraft tend to have really annoying bleeping sounds to denote hostile targeting or missiles tracking you. This seems a crude approach that makes little use of the brain's ability to take in and analyze a complete soundscape and then extract the most vital portions of it. While a computer can certainly make some overall judgements as to which activities are relevant and which are not, it will likely fail a lot if depended on to make very fine-grained judgements. Therefore, if the computer can produce a complete composite soundscape that includes everything the computer considers "relevant", it leaves the detailed decision to the pilot.
This might be more desirable than the current situation, and as our understanding of the brain and its ability to distinguish and categorize sound improves, it may very well be where we are headed in the future.
In Luke's case, if he can keep his eyes on space in front of him and have a good surround-sound system that tells him exactly where the "laser" bolt behind him is going, that might enable him to both evade enemy fire _and_ keep the enemy in his sights at the same time, rather then just concentrating on a single one.
I tend to find this a whole lot more believable than the alternative suggestion that "space fighter pilots would not get any audio feedback from their craft at all." Even if the Star Wars audio feedback is a bit on the cinematic side :-)

Re:details

[FireFury03]

I don't think 'hot' is used to describe a location that is 7 billion miles from the sun

Actually, "hot" (or temperature) is really describing the energy of the particles in the area. Inside the solar system, the solar wind is moving at pretty high speeds - wikipedia suggests energies of 500 KeV. Using the Boltzmann Constant we get 500,000 x 11,605 = 5.8 billion degrees K (Sounds a lot - can some astrophysacists check my figures please :).

Once you get to the termination shock, the solar wind is moving at much slower sub-sonic speeds. Not sure what energies we're talking about here but they're going to be a *lot* lower... A bit of googling suggests He energies somewhere around the 5.2 KeV area (5,200 x 11,605 = 60 million degrees K).

Of course, although the matter may be "hot", there isn't much of it - the low density of matter means that there isn't much "heat" (compare - a cigarette is "hot" (it's gonna burn you) whereas a central heating radiator is not as hot but generates more "heat" (it'll warm your room better than the cigarette because it's total energy output is much greater, even though it's temperature is less)).

Disclaimer: IANAAP (Astro-Physacist) so the above could be crap, but that is how I understand it.

Re:Funny

[Tim Doran]

And yet you achieved a "Score:5, Funny".

Nicely done, my friend.

How do we know what the milky way looks like?

[SCHecklerX]

I've always wondered how we get these pictures of the milky way. Anybody have a clue?