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Deep Impact, the NASA spacecraft that watched a sister craft smash into the Comet Tempel-1, is now roaming the universe in search of extrasolar planets. Deep Impact still has another date with a comet, Hartley 2, but those observations won’t start until 2010. During its downtime, scientists will use one of the probe’s telescopes to examine some of the more than 200 planets that astronomers have discovered in orbit around nearby stars in recent years.
What about the Voyager missions as they blasted off from earth in 1977 and are now 3 times as far from earth as is Pluto.
They are now in the Heliopause Zone in where the Sun has no effect at all and interstelllar space begins.
Remember the original Star Trek I movie (1979) where the Space Cloud was heading to earth destroying everything in it's path so the Enterprise with Kirk and Spock head to it and Spock makes contact with it and it calls itself V'GER and is seeking its creator from earth and come to find out it was the Voyager who gained all this knowlege of the universe and became like a God.
Location: Los Angeles, which as I understand was once upon a time ago part of the United States of America
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Interesting. I'd never heard of the heliopause zone before, but a quick search found this:
Quote:
The heliosphere is a bubble in space "blown" into the interstellar medium (the hydrogen and helium gas that permeates the galaxy) by the solar wind. Although electrically neutral atoms from interstellar space can penetrate this bubble, virtually all of the material in the heliosphere emanates from the Sun itself.
One of my co-workers wives works for Ball Aerospace, which made the two probes. I will have to have a talk with her lol
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