V'ger Continues It's Travels

Voyager 1 has reached the solar system's final frontier. Here it is from Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA's Voyager 1 has reached the final frontier of our solar system, having traveled through a turbulent place where electrically charged particles from the Sun crash into thin gas from interstellar space.

Astronomers tracking the little spaceship's 26-year journey from Earth believe Voyager 1 has gone through a region known as termination shock, some 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, and entered an area called the heliosheath.

"Voyager 1 has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space," Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Voyager watchers theorized last November that the craft might be reaching this bumpy region of space when the charged solar particles known as the solar wind seemed to slow down from a top speed of 1.5 million miles per hour.

This was expected at the area of termination shock, where the solar winds were expected to decelerate as they bump up against gas from the space beyond our solar system. It is more than twice as distant as Pluto, the furthest planet in our system.

By monitoring the craft's speed and the increase in the force of the solar wind, Voyager scientists now believe the craft has made it through the shock and into the heliosheath.

So, there we are friends. V'ger is well on its way to become one of the greatest artifical minds ever. I will be glad when it returns as a large spacecraft bent on destroying the carbon units on this planet.

More can be found here Voyager 1 NASA web site.