Latest Heliosphere Stories

Ancient explorers set sail expecting to encounter dragons on the world's unknown oceans. NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft are searching for dragons of a different sort as they enter the boundary of our solar system "“ cosmic "dragons" that breathe a strange fire of high-speed atomic fragments called cosmic rays. Just as mythical dragons were expected to inhabit stormy seas, these cosmic dragons could be found among turbulent magnetic fields powered by the colliding winds of stars,...

On November 17th, the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission reached another important milestone on its epic out-of-ecliptic journey: the start of the third passage over the Sun's south pole.Launched in 1990, the European-built spacecraft is engaged in the exploration of the heliosphere, the bubble in space blown out by the solar wind. Given the capricious nature of the Sun, this third visit will undoubtedly reveal new and unexpected features of our star's environment. The first polar passes in 1994...

Almost every day, the great antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network turn to a blank patch of sky in the constellation Ophiuchus. Pointing at nothing, or so it seems, they invariably pick up a signal, faint but full of intelligence. The source is beyond Neptune, beyond Pluto, on the verge of the stars themselves. It's Voyager 1. The spacecraft left Earth in 1977 on a mission to visit Jupiter and Saturn. Almost 30 years later, with the gas giants long ago seen and done, Voyager 1 is still going...

Possible presence of companion starNEWPORT BEACH, CA - Nearly 30 years after launch, the two Voyager spacecraft are still operational and returning useful data. In their early years they produced some of the first close up images of the large outer planets. Now as the two vehicles, flying in slightly different directions, near the edge of the solar system, they are providing clues on the shape of heliosphere, and quite possibly, the direction of the solar system through local space. The...

ESA -- Fifteen years after its launch, the grand ESA/NASA Ulysses space mission is still going strong, orbiting the Sun and continuing to tell exciting stories about our nearest star. Carried into space on 6 October 1990 by the Space Shuttle Discovery, the European-built Ulysses spacecraft has already travelled an amazing seven thousand million kilometres. During this voyage of exploration, Ulysses has literally opened new windows on the heliosphere, that vast region of space carved out by...

NASA's Voyager 1 has passed into the border region at the edge of the solar system and now is sending back information about this never-before-explored area, say scientists at the University of Maryland. "We have confirmed, for the first time, that Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock on Dec. 16, 2004," said Frank McDonald, a senior research scientist at the university's Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and a coauthor on two of four Voyager 1 papers published in the...

JPL -- NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system's final frontier. It is entering a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun's influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars."Voyager 1 has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space,"said Dr. Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which built and operates...

ESA -- Measurements by the SWAN instrument onboard SOHO, have shown that the heliosphere, the solar wind filled volume which prevents the solar system from getting embedded in the local (ambient) interstellar medium is not axi-symmetrical, but is distorted, very likely under the effect of the local galactic magnetic field. From the measured distortion it is possible to determine the direction of this field, and future models will hopefully derive its intensity. This is the last missing...