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18 billion kilometers from home: NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has entered interstellar space
Positions of two interplanetary stations – Voyager-1 and Voyager-2. Photo: EPA-EFE / NASA / JPL-CALTECH
NASA reported that the Voyager-2 spacecraft was the second human device created to leave the heliosphere border. His devices will tell us about this previously unknown territory.
Two interplanetary stations – Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 – launched in 1977. They took different directions, pursuing similar objectives. The first was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. The second task was to study the distant planets of the solar system. He flew alongside Jupiter and Saturn and photographed Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively, to write nude science.
Both devices operate on thermal radioisotope generators. As their output power decreases each year, some devices have had to be disconnected later. However, the "Voyager-2" still uses a plasma sensor called Plasma Science Experiment (PLS). On the Voyager 1, he fainted in 1980. Thanks to him, scientists were able to reliably prove that the second aircraft had left the heliosphere, an area close to the solar space, made up of particles of the solar wind lying within the magnetic field created by the Sun.
Until recently, PLS using a fixed-speed electric current, density, temperature and solar wind pressure. On November 5, Voyager-2 showed a clear decrease in the speed of solar wind particles. Since that day, PLS no longer records their presence. Therefore, NASA specialists are now convinced that the Voyager-2 has finally overcome the heliopause, a sunny boundary and a cold interstellar medium.
The device has now moved from Earth to 18 billion kilometers. However, operators can still receive from him information that will reach the planet in 16.5 hours
In addition to the PLS, aboard the Voyager-2, there are still three other devices: a Cosmic Ray subsystem sensor, a magnetometer and particle charged with low energy. The NASA team hopes that the performance of these devices will tell more about a new, unexplored environment in which it has emerged.
Although both probes have left the heliosphere, they have not yet exceeded the limits of the gravitational limit of the solar system, which is determined by the outer portion of the Oort cloud – a sphere of comets and small objects that are still preserved by the gravity of the star. The exact size of the Oort cloud is unknown, but the distance between the Sun and the outer limits can range from 50 to 100,000 astronomical units (distance from the Earth to the Sun). It may take 30,000 years for "Voyager-2" to go beyond this region.
"Our research began with the Sun and spread to all that its wind is affecting, and now the information of Voyager, who escaped from this area and released from the influence of the star, give an unprecedented opportunity to find something really new in an absolutely unknown territory, "said Nicola Fox, head of the heliophysics department at NASA.
Voyager 1 officially abandoned the limits of the solar system in September 2013.
Remember that NASA's ship had found watery ingredients on Benn's asteroid.
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