While NASA doesn't plan to send new spacecraft into
interstellar space, there is an ongoing effort to explore new ideas and concepts that will help understand the possibilities and opportunities to discover something valuable to science.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft is now in
interstellar space, Nasa announced Monday, making it the second human-made machine to cross a boundary that divides our solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy.
Interstellar space is filled with cosmic rays from distant stars, rather than plasma from our sun.
"This is a very exciting time again in Voyager's 41-year journey, so far, of exploring the planets and now the heliosphere and entering
interstellar space," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at Caltech, told a news briefing.
The Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that is said to provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into
interstellar space. "Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we're seeing is new.
Researchers and engineers from the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center have been selected to be a part of a NASA science mission to sample, analyze and map particles streaming to Earth from the edges of
interstellar space.
Even though, as a group, PAHs seemed to be the answer to this mystery, none of the hundreds of PAH molecules known to exist had ever been conclusively detected in
interstellar space.
They are planning to use the Hubble Space Telescope to get more images of Oumuamua within the week, as it speeds farther away from us and back into
interstellar space.
Voyager 1 has now been in
interstellar space for the past four years, zooming ahead at 62,140km/h (35,000mph)--studying, among other things, how the magnetic field of our Sun interacts with the magnetic field in the
interstellar space.
Previous ideas on how long and how far [cosmic rays] travel in
interstellar space were probably incorrect.
WASHINGTON (CyHAN)- In 14 papers published in the October 2015 Astrophysical Journal Supplement, scientists present findings from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, mission providing the most definitive analyses, theories and results about local
interstellar space to date.