« links for 2006-09-22 | Home | San Francisco Net to Go Public? »
NASA - Surprises from the Edge of the Solar System
By Larry Hendrick | September 23, 2006
The year is 2271 and The Starship Enterprise is deployed to investigate strange goings on within Klingon territory moving into Federation space. Star Trek: The Motion Picture ultimately discovers Voyager 1 returning to see The Creator and destroying anything less than perfect that gets in its way.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, and now almost thirty years later is still reporting back to NASA from 10 Billion miles away.
NASA - Surprises from the Edge of the Solar System
Sept. 21, 2006: 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 and encountering some strange things.
The information that Voyager 1 is sending back includes several surprises that scientists are trying to decipher. The article covers these three in-depth and shows that, sometimes answers bring more questions.
- Magnetic Potholes
- Sluggish solar wind
- Anomalous Cosmic Rays
Topics: Life, Technology |