Voyager 1 Returns Surprising Data about an Unexplored Region of Deep Space
(http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/images/features/features1.jpg)
About the Voyager 1 spacecraft, this much is clear: the NASA probe has traveled farther than any other. Voyager 1 is now more than 18.5 billion kilometers from the sun--almost 125 times the distance between Earth and the sun. The spacecraft, one of two Voyagers launched by NASA in 1977, is truly in unexplored territory--so much so that defining its current whereabouts poses a bit of a challenge.
Someday soon, it is expected, Voyager 1 will become the first spacecraft to exit the heliosphere--the bubble of solar plasma encasing the sun and planets--and enter the interstellar medium. Right now, however, Voyager appears to be crossing through one of several puzzling new regions of the heliosphere that mission planners had not anticipated.
In a trio of studies published online June 27 in Science, Voyager scientists describe the latest heliospheric wrinkle discovered by the probe en route to interstellar space. Voyager 1, they report, appears to have crossed last August into what is now being called the "heliosheath depletion region." The researchers described some characteristics of the new region in a December 2012 teleconference with reporters, but the new studies go into far more detail about Voyager 1's environs.
http://news.yahoo.com/voyager-1-returns-surprising-data-unexplored-region-deep-181500828.html
Voyager 1: At the edge of our 'solar bubble'
(http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/images/final_frontier_top.jpg)
Voyager 1 is at the edge of our "solar bubble," the final heliosphere frontier before interstellar space.
A new set of three papers on data from the interstellar probe Voyager 1 explain the last region of our solar system the craft is crossing before it reaches interstellar space.
The astronomical community was at odds earlier this year when the American Geophysical Union announced that Voyager 1 had indeed left the solar system. They quickly corrected the claim, and NASA acknowledged that the craft had entered a new region of space, but it was not interstellar.
The confusion began because Voyager 1 reached a point where charged particles from the sun run up against interstellar particles and effectively stop flowing out from our solar system. This range of solar particles is known as the heliosphere, and it's edge is the heliosheath.
The new papers, published in Science, focus on observations made from May to September 2012 by Voyager 1's cosmic ray, low-energy charged particle and magnetometer instruments, with additional charged particle data obtained through April of this year.
The craft is now in the helioshpere depletion region -- a zone characterized by an extreme drop in particles from the sun and an increase in cosmic rays, sometimes called the magnetic highway
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Blog/2013/06/28/Voyager-1-At-the-edge-of-our-solar-bubble/7021372423075/
What is the Golden Record?
(http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/images/features/features2.jpg)
Where are the Voyagers? NASA Mission Page (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/)