# Voyager discovers 'magnetic highway'



## Harpo (Dec 5, 2012)

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/voyager-discovers-magnetic-highway-edge-solar-system-234106463.html

 NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has encountered a "magnetic  highway" at the edge of the solar system, a surprising discovery 35  years after its launch, the experts behind the pioneering craft said  Monday.
 Earlier this year a surge in a key indicator fueled hopes that the  craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which marks the boundary  between our solar system and outer space.
 But instead of slipping away from the bubble of charged particles the  Sun blows around itself, Voyager encountered something completely  unexpected.
 The craft's daily radio reports sent back evidence that the Sun's  magnetic field lines was connected to interstellar magnetic fields.  Lower-energy charged particles were zooming out and higher-energy  particles from outside were streaming in.
 They called it a magnetic highway because charged particles outside  this region bounced around in all directions, as if trapped on local  roads inside the bubble, or heliosphere.
 "Although Voyager 1 still is inside the Sun's environment, we now can  taste what it's like on the outside because the particles are zipping  in and out on this magnetic highway," said Edward Stone, a Voyager  project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology,  Pasadena.
 "We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar  space. Our best guess is it's likely just a few months to a couple years  away. The new region isn't what we expected, but we've come to expect  the unexpected from Voyager."
 Voyager is now 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the  Sun, which is 122 times the distances from the Earth to the Sun. Yet it  takes only 17 hours for its radio signal to reach us.
 Scientists began to think it was reaching the edge of our solar  system two years ago when the solar winds died down and particles  settled in space the way they would in a swamp.
 An increase in the number of cosmic rays in May also led them to believe Voyager had approached interstellar space.
 In July the reading changed again, and by August 25 Voyager was on  the magnetic highway. The number of particles from the outside jumped  sharply and the number of particles from the inside fell by a factor of  1,000.
 "It is as if someone opened the floodgates and they were all moved  down the river, also some boaters powered up stream with close to the  speed of light have been able to get in at last," said Stamatios  Krimigis, Voyager's principal investigator of low-energy charged  particles.
 While the magnetic field is exciting, Krimigis sounded somewhat disappointed that Voyager had not yet escaped the solar system.
 "Nature is very imaginative and Lucy pulled up the football again,"  he said, making reference to the classic comic strip Peanuts in a  conference call with reporters.
 The twin Voyager craft -- Voyager 2 was actually launched first, on  August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5 -- were designed  primarily to study the biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and  Saturn.
 Taking advantage of a planetary alignment, they fulfilled that  mission before pushing on to Uranus and Neptune, beaming back stunning  images of the first two in 1979 and 1980, and the latter pair in 1986  and 1989.
 But with those jobs complete and both craft still functioning  perfectly, project managers decided to keep mining information as the  devices fly further into the void.
 NASA has described Voyager 1 and its companion Voyager 2 as "the two  most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to  explore."
 The scientists controlling Voyager 1 -- whose 1970s technology gives  it just a 100,000th of the computer memory of an eight-gigabyte iPod  Nano -- decided to turn off its cameras after it passed Neptune in 1989  to preserve power.
 Assuming the craft continues to function normally, they will have to  start turning off other on-board instruments from 2020, and it is  expected to run out of power completely in 2025.


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## Moonbat (Dec 5, 2012)

This was quite interetsing news, and the pictures (or artist's impressions) are very exciting, but I wonder how realistic they.

With a note to your last paragraph, I assume other old craft are heading out of the solar system, but with a lot more computing power, and or power sources. But my real question was are they travelling faster? I know Voyager 1 is travelling faster than Vayager 2, but I wondered if at the end of a different craft's use in our solar system they put it into a close orbit slingshot type thing to try and give it even more speed as it travels away from our solar system?


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## Vertigo (Dec 5, 2012)

Actually Moonbat I think there is only one - New Horizons - and I'm not sure that is going to travel out of the solar system still operating. The two older pioneer craft will head out of the solar system I think, but again I don't think they are operational any longer. So the Voyagers are really going to be our only look at this area of space for a long time to come.

It's certainly fascinating to discover something new that is so unexpected. The two Voyagers seem to have managed to do that rather a lot!


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## mosaix (Dec 5, 2012)

Moonbat said:


> I assume other old craft are heading out of the solar system, but with a lot more computing power, and or power sources.



There's lots of older stuff up there but most of it went into orbit around the Sun rather than heading out of the solar system.


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## Dave (Dec 5, 2012)

Moonbat said:


> I assume other old craft are heading out of the solar system, but with a lot more computing power, and or power sources.





mosaix said:


> There's lots of older stuff up there but most of it went into orbit around the Sun rather than heading out of the solar system.


It isn't only the direction the Voyagers were sent off in, but specifically the precise timing that allowed them to be slingshot using planetary gravities. This was especially true of Voyager 1. It was a practically one-off chance to do it.

This BBC article explains it better than I would:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20033940


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## Vertigo (Dec 6, 2012)

Yes and I think that without that they wouldn't have been able to achieve the required escape velocity for the solar system. So the bottom line is that I'm pretty sure those two are our only envoys.


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