Latest Voyager 2 Stories

NASA -- To the surprise of astronomers, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a pair of new rings around the distant planet Uranus. The largest is twice the diameter of the planet's previously known rings. The new rings are so far away that they are being called Uranus's "second ring system."In addition, Hubble has spied two small satellites, one sharing its orbit with one of the newly discovered rings. Even more surprisingly, precise analysis of the data reveals that the...

University of Iowa Space Physicist Don Gurnett and his UI colleagues report that a scientific instrument aboard the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft is working perfectly and that its data have so far revealed that Mars' ionosphere -- part of the upper atmosphere -- is very lumpy and complex, and that the instrument can "see" hidden craters and thick layers of ice beneath the planet's surface. Gurnett's findings were scheduled for presentation in the Thursday,...

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...

Arizona -- Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus is "absolutely" a highlight of the Cassini mission and should be targeted in future searches for life, Robert H. Brown of The University of Arizona, leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, said last week. Brown and other Cassini scientists attended a meeting in London last week and are at the 37th annual Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at Cambridge University this week. "Enceladus is without a doubt one...

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...