3 Questions: MIT goes interstellar with Voyager 2
NASA announced today that the Voyager 2 spacecraft, some 11 billion miles from home, crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the bubble of space governed by charged particles from our sun and the interstellar medium, or material between stars, on Nov. 5. In an historic feat for the mission, Voyager 2's plasma instrument, developed at MIT in the 1970s, is set to make the first direct measurements of the interstellar plasma. The twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the solar system's gas giant planets. With their initial missions achieved and expanded, the spacecraft have continued outward toward the edges of the solar system for the past four decades; today they are the most distant human-made objects from Earth. Voyager 1 is 13 billion miles from Earth and crossed into the interstellar medium in 2012, but its plasma instrument is no longer functioning. Several researchers from MIT...