Latest Voyager 1 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,...

The highest wind speeds in Jupiter's Little Red Spot have increased and are now equal to those in its older and larger sibling, the Great Red Spot, according to observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Little Red Spot's winds, now raging up to approximately 400 miles per hour, signal that the storm is growing stronger, according to the NASA-led team that made the Hubble observations. The increased intensity of the storm probably caused it to change color from its original white in...

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...

Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reaches 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 5:13 p.m. Eastern time (2:13 p.m. Pacific time). That means the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, will be 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is. In more common terms, Voyager 1 will be about 15 billion kilometers (9.3 billion miles) from the sun. Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist and the former director of NASA's Jet...

SWRI -- When Voyager 1 finally crossed the "termination shock" at the edge of interstellar space in December 2004, space physicists anticipated the long-sought discovery of the source of anomalous cosmic rays. These cosmic rays, among the most energetic particle radiation in the solar system, are thought to be produced at the termination shock - the boundary at the edge of the solar system where the million-mile-per-hour solar wind abruptly slows. A mystery unfolded instead when...

By Irene KlotzCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The world's first mission to Pluto blasted into space on Thursday on an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket to begin a 9 1/2-year journey to the only unexplored planet in the solar system.After two days of delays due to poor weather and a power outage, the 197-foot-tall (60-metre-tall) rocket, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., lifted off at 2 p.m. (1900 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.The launch team remained on edge until 45 minutes later when...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA canceled Wednesday's launch of the U.S. space agency's first probe to Pluto after the mission control headquarters in Maryland lost power, officials said. The launch of the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft on a massive Atlas 5 rocket had been postponed from Tuesday due to high winds at the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. NASA officials said it was not immediately clear why mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied...

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 -- Scientists are celebrating the first Cassini spacecraft sighting of spokes, the ghostly radial markings discovered in Saturn's rings by NASA's Voyager spacecraft 25 years ago. A sequence of images taken on the side of the rings not illuminated by the sun has captured a few faint, narrow spokes in the outer B ring, about 3,500 kilometers long and about 100 kilometers wide (2,200 miles by 60 miles). Previously, scientists believed the visibility of spokes depended on the elevation of 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...