Voyager Enters Final Frontier Of Solar System Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://planetary.org/news/2005/voyager-upd...ation_0524.html

Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in space, has crossed the termination shock, the last major threshold in the solar system, team members announced today at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

[JTN]

Curious to know if the measurements form anything that could be described as an image. Does the full article say -- anyone have Science access? (I can't tell from the free online supplement.)

Measurements are said to be taken with the ultraviolet spectrometer (UVS). This page quotes FOV as 0.10° × 0.87°, so maximum spatial resolution would be pretty coarse. From hints in the supplement, I guess the data are much coarser.

This page (date unknown) says: "data is being collected from the Ultraviolet Spectrometer Subsystem (UVS). While there are no science investigation teams associated with this instrument, the captured data is made available to interested scientists." If this was true at the time the relevant measurements were taken, I guess they might not have been chosen with this investigation in mind?

New Scientist says the instruments have since been turned off (corroborated by this page: V1 1998, V2 2002).

[Paolo]

Curious to know if the measurements form anything that could be described as an image. Does the full article say -- anyone have Science access? (I can't tell from the free online supplement.)

there is an image in the paper (fig. 2, for those having access) showing "Scan data point directions superimposed on" a hydrogen-alpha map of the sky. Scan data points are colorized to indicate "the intensity of the continuum, with red indicating its absence and blue the most intense".
no real image, actually...

as for the date scans were taken, Voyager 1 operated between 1993 and mid-2003 and V2 between 1993 and mid-1998.