Thursday, December 08, 2011

Voyager 1 : Truly In Interstellar Space Now?!


For the first time, Voyager's instruments have begun to detect gusts of charged particles blowing back towards our sun, so many scientists now are confident to say that voyager has indeed reached interstellar space. Of course this now begs the questions, if not from the sun then where do these charged particles originate?

Tracking puts Voyager 1 at about 11 billion miles from the sun. Roughly three or four times farther away than Pluto. The probe should have enough fuel and propellant to continue operating until at least 2020, by which time it'll be about 12.5 billion miles from us. Damn that has got to make ya proud about something!

Dvice article

2 comments:

revzef said...

Does this mean we can now call it V-ger?

Beam Me Up said...

oh big GROAN revzef! Nope, not yet, it has to float around what....500 years or so before it runs into the bio probe?