NASA's first voyage outside the solar system - Indian Express

PTI : Washington, Fri Sep 13 2013, 13:25 hrs NASA's Voyager1 reaches transitional space just outside the Solar bubble. (Reuters) NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched 36 years ago - and now 19 billion kilometres from the Sun - has become the first man-made object to venture into interstellar space, the US space agency has said. The new and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been travelling for about a year through plasma, or ionised gas, present in the space between stars, NASA said at a news conference, on Thursday. "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 analyse those observations and make sense of them. Scientists do not know when Voyager will reach the undisturbed part of interstellar space where there is no influence from Sun," he said. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our Sun are still evident. "We literally jumped out of our seats when we saw these oscillations in our data - they showed us the spacecraft was in an entirely new region, comparable to what was expected in interstellar space, and totally different than in the solar bubble," said Don Gurnett who led the new analysis along with and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa. Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the Sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004. Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft's interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years, NASA said. The finding was published in the journal Science. As Voyager 1 does not have a working plasma sensor, scientists needed a different way to measure the spacecraft's plasma environment to make a definitive determination of its location. ... contd. ALSO READ Lenovo launches Thinkpad Edge E431 laptop with onelink technology Audio pioneer Ray Dolby, founder of Dolby Laboratories, dies at 80 'Ferrari of space' to run out of fuel, set to fall to Earth With iPhone 5S, Apple Inc fires biometrics into mainstream with fingerprint tech Please read our terms of use before posting comments TERMS OF USE: The views, opinions and comments posted are your, and are not endorsed by this website. You shall be solely responsible for the comment posted here. The website reserves the right to delete, reject, or otherwise remove any views, opinions and comments posted or part thereof. You shall ensure that the comment is not inflammatory, abusive, derogatory, defamatory &/or obscene, or contain pornographic matter and/or does not constitute hate mail, or violate privacy of any person (s) or breach confidentiality or otherwise is illegal, immoral or contrary to public policy. Nor should it contain anything infringing copyright &/or intellectual property rights of any person(s). via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHfLE6RodUTMUHEOHq0X_fp_1B1Bw&url=http://www.indianexpress.com/news/nasa-s-first-voyage-outside-the-solar-system/1168745/

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