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.

[ljk4-1]

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE

The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News

Number 778 May 26, 2006 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein,
and Davide Castelvecchi www.aip.org/pnu

THE MISSHAPEN SOLAR SYSTEM. Having traveled far beyond the planets
in their 28.5-year journey, the two Voyager spacecraft are providing
new information on the heliosphere, the teardrop-shaped bubble that
separates the solar system from interstellar space. At this week's
Joint Assembly Meeting in Baltimore of the American Geophysical
Union (AGU) and several other geophysics-related societies, Ed Stone
of Caltech reported that the heliosphere is deformed, according to
Voyager observations, with the teardrop's rounded edge bulging at
the top (the northern hemisphere of the solar system) and squashed
at the bottom (the southern hemisphere). (See pictures and movies at
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solars...er_2006agu.html
) As Rob Decker of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory explained, the asymmetry is due to a magnetic field from
interstellar space pushing on the southern hemisphere. The field is
about 1/100,000 the strength of Earth's field but its effects can be
felt for billions of miles, since it is acting over a large area on
the very dilute gas at the solar system's edge.

The interstellar field even squashes an important spherical zone
inside the heliosphere, called the termination shock. Analogous to
the circle that forms when water splatters on a sink, the
termination shock represents the boundary at which the rapidly
traveling solar wind (the stream of charged gas from the sun) slows
down abruptly and piles up. Voyager 2's measurements indicate that
the southern part of the termination sphere might be a billion miles
closer to the sun than the northern part. Moreover, forces from the
solar wind cause the termination shock to breathe in and out roughly
every dozen years. Voyager 1 has already ventured beyond the
termination shock, to the heliosheath, the region where solar wind
and interstellar gas mix. So in a way, the end of the solar system
is not clearly defined. Stone guesses it could be another 10 years
(3-4 billion miles) before the two spacecraft pass through the
heliopause (the very outermost boundary of the heliosphere) and
enter purely interstellar space. The spacecraft have about another
15 years of power left in them. (Session SH02 at meeting; see
http://www.agu.org/meetings/ja06/?content=search)

Do you have a link to the press kit? Or a press kit etc. of any of the other encounters?

Analyst

There is the Voyager Neptune Travel Guide online:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1990004096.pdf

Other online Voyager documents from NASA can be found here by
scrolling all the way down (the spacecraft are listed in alphabetical order):

http://www.geocities.com/bobandrepont/unmannedpdf.htm