Latest Voyager program Stories

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...

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...

LONDON -- Saturn, a giant gas planet encircled with yellow and gold bands, is spinning slower than expected, scientists said on Wednesday.Instead of a day on Saturn lasting roughly 11 hours, an international team of researchers has calculated the rotation period is 10 hours and 47 minutes -- eight minutes slower than estimates from the NASA Voyager results from the early 1980s.It may not sound like a lot but the researchers said it could affect the size of the planet's rock and ice core...

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 Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's first space probe to Pluto, set to lift off on Tuesday, will use radioactive plutonium pellets to power much of its expected nine-year journey to the far reaches of the solar system. The U.S. space agency, which is seeing protests against the plutonium load, will use the largest rocket in the U.S. fleet as part of a plan that calls for bouncing the small probe, about the size of a grand piano, off Jupiter's massive gravity...

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...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrived at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida on Saturday for final preparations and testing for the probe's decade-long journey. It will be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its moon Charon. New Horizons arrived at Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane and was moved to a clean room for processing and testing. It is scheduled to launch on a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket in January 2006. New Horizons recently completed...

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...