Voyager1's Last Engineer Retires

Here is a sceanerio worth putting your mind to.  
Imagine you're in charge of a computer that is 40 years old. That's right, a computer right out of the Atari age.

As fantastical as it sounds, that is exactly the problem facing NASA's voyager mission now that the last remaining engineer Larry Zottarelli is retiring at the age of eighty.

We have established that Voyager1 (which in 2013 left the the solar system completely) is indeed old, (it is amazing that the craft is operational at all!) but it is also an amagingly far from Earth at somewhere near 15 billion miles!

Suzy Dodd, Voyager1's present project manager, says flying voyager1 is like flying an Apple II computer.

At launch Voyager1 hefted a beefy 64kb of memory. Not megabytes, not gigabytes but sixty four Kilo Bytes!  It's data is recorded on an eight track tape!

There are so many more nothing short of amazing data points about Voyager1, one is a wonder the

craft continues to fly at all!

Check out the Fox 40 online article HERE to get to the original article.   

Voyager Argument All Over Again.......

Yep, that's right.  The Voyager argument continues to rage on.  Has it or Hasn't it?  

According to NASA's JPL which continues to monitor Voyager:

• A paper recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters describes an alternate model for the interaction between the heliosphere ....... and the interstellar medium. It  proposes a test for whether Voyager 1 has, indeed, left the heliosphere.

NASA's Voyager project scientist, Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena explains:

• (the) models, which he and colleagues used to conclude that Voyager 1 entered interstellar space, predict that the density of interstellar wind outside the heliosphere is 40 times greater than the density of the solar wind inside.
• The observational data .... revealed a plasma density that was 40 times higher.  (So) they concluded that Voyager 1 had ... entered interstellar space around August 25, 2012.

However new models:

• (argue) that solar wind inside the heliosphere can be compressed to the point that the solar wind density inside is just as high as interstellar space outside. Therefore, Voyager 1 could still be inside.

If Voyager 1 is still inside the heliosphere, it should observe a reversal in direction of the solar magnetic field sometime before the end of 2015. 

Scientists at JPL will be looking carefully at the  data  coming in  over the next 18 months to see if Voyager picks up this change.

To read the complete NASA JPL article click HERE

Confirmed: Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System!!

Professor of physics at the University of Iowa, Donald A. Gurnett, confirmed Thursday that Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has left the solar system.

At present, Voyager 1 is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and traveling at 38,000 miles per hour which makes it one of the fastest spacecraft ever flown.

But the point of contention has been has it or will it soon break through the heliosphere which is made up of particles from the sun that surround the whole solar system.  However Gurnett's paper in the journal Science states categorically that the event happened Aug. 25, 2012.

Read the complete NewYork Times article HERE   and a Multimedia file HERE

Voyager Has Left the Building....

Kall asked the question in last week's RUNDOWN segment, where exactly IS Voyager?

Well now, according to Reuters, new research indicates that the craft left the confines of the Solar System last year.  Making it the first man made object to do so.  

This new research is based on conclusions by physicist Marc Swisdak of  the University of Maryland.  Up until this point, scientists have based Voyager's position to magnetic fields.  These fields, according to computer models, will flow away from the sun as long as Voyager is in the Solar System. These fields should stop and the flow then should come from the interstellar medium and flow towards the solar system.  

However Swisdak's findings suggest that Solar System magnetic flows and interstellar's flow are aligned enough that "you can actually pass through without seeing a huge change in direction,"

If this is indeed the case then Voyager's position can only be based upon the amount of particles from Sol or cosmic rays flowing toward the Solar System from the interstellar medium.  This very scenario occurred with Voyager last year, hence the conclusion by Swisdak that Voyager has indeed left the Solar System and did so last year when Voyager detected a sharp drop in particles from Sol and   a corresponding increase in particle influx toward the Solar System. 

From the article:

• Voyager lead scientist Edward Stone, now retired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Swisdak's research is interesting but different computer models are portraying different scenarios to explain the Voyager data.

Read complete Reuters article HERE

Voyager 1 Closing in on Interstellar Space

The latest data from Voyager 1 seems to indicate that it is at this moment at the very edge of the space influenced by Sol and entrance into interstellar space is now eminent.  

At present, Voyager is over 11 billion miles from Earth and at this remote distance particles from the sun have all but dissipated.  Controllers have also noticed that particles coming  towards Voyager from interstellar space,  have jumped markedly in the past year.

This of course means that Voyager 1 is set, any time now, to become the first  man made object to exit the solar system. 

More about Voyager 1 at Wikipedia

Complete BBC article HERE

NASA Shuts Down Heaters on Voyager 1 to Conserve Power

In an effort to conserve diminishing power, NASA controllers turned of the heater to the ultraviolet spectrometer instrument aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The temperature dropped to minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit which is the coldest temperature the instrument has ever experienced. The shut-down is an effort to make sure that the craft will be able to continue to collect and transmit data for another decade at the very least.

The ultraviolet spectrometer was designed to operate at temperatures as low as minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit but continues to operate at temperatures much lower than that.

This latest shut down was part of the shutdowns of heaters of the nearby infrared spectrometer. This detector has not worked since 1998.

Science Digest article

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

Voyager May Have Left the Big Back Yard?!

Scientists analyzing data returning from Voyager 1 may have crossed into the helio-pause and entered for all intents - interstellar space, much sooner than they had expected it to.

This is based on data from Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument. This instrument is now indicating that charged particles from the sun are no longer moving. This phenomenon first presented itself in February of this year (2011) telling controllers that Voyager has moved into an unexpected area much sooner than they expected.

At this point the area of charged particles persists around the sun out to a distance of 11 billion miles or so and with Voyager at that very same distance, it was only a matter of time before it happened and may have taken place already.

Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist, says "...Voyager 1 speeds outward a billion miles every three years, so we may not have long to wait..."

Complete Daily Galaxy Article Here