Thursday September 21, 2006

Voyager I left Earth almost 30 years ago to visit Jupiter and Saturn. It's now beyond the solar system and outside the heliosphere, a large bubble of Sun-created gas about four-times wider than the orbit of Neptune. It's cruising through the heliosheath and will be for another ten years.

Amazingly, Voyager is still sending back data. And it's been finding some very weird things out there. NASA has a nice article here that gives all the details, including instructions on how to simulate the heliosphere and heliosheath in your kitchen sink.

With respect to the mystery around the source of the so-called Anomalous Cosmic Rays, if they aren't being created by the inner boundary of the heliosheath as was originally thought, and are instead coming from deeper within the heliosheath, perhaps the question isn't WHAT is producing the rays, but WHO? (cue creepy music here) :-)

All kidding aside, that we have sent a man-made object some 10 billion miles from Earth is absolutely mind-boggling to me. What a truly wonderful feat of engineering!