WORLD
Voyager tastes interstellar space; first Chinese woman in orbit
Baku, June 18 (AZERTAC). In Duluth you have two types of weather - “warmer over the hill” and “colder by the lake”. It can be a pleasant 75 degrees with a light breeze on the hill during the spring and early summer months. On the same day, a seven-minute drive downtown to the shore of Lake Superior shocks the senses. Winds blast from the east with temperatures in the low 50s. You don`t want to get caught without a jacket close at hand in this town.
NASA`s Voyager 1 space probe is making a similar journey from the cool comforts of the solar system to the energetic boundary of interstellar space. Launched in 1977, the craft flew past Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 198o, returning beautiful images and making amazing discoveries. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, discovered the rings of Jupiter, sulfur volcanoes on the moon Io, lightning and aurora on the giant planets, more than 1000 ringlets around Saturn and many new moons.
Today they`re still chugging away at the fringe of the solar system known as the heliosheath, a region of space where the sun`s influence wanes and the stars take over.
At 11.1 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth. Just to radio data back to NASA`s Deep Space Network antennas, the transmission time requires 16 hours and 38 minutes traveling at the speed of light.
Our sun gives off a steady stream of charged particles - electrons and protons - in the form of the solar wind. The wind creates a gigantic bubble called the heliosphere around the solar system that defines the sun`s domain. All the planets, comets and asteroids we know of orbit within the heliosphere.