VOYAGER 1 may not exit the solar system for another 15 years. Well frak.
You can cancel those high-fives, folks. Despite reports last year that Voyager 1 was finally throwing up the deuces to our solar system, new intel suggests we may be looking at a much longer exit timeline. Hope your liver and heart is well, ’cause if you want to be alive for this grand event you may need another decade and a half.
New Scientist:
It launched 35 years ago today, but the most distant spacecraft from Earth is stubbornly refusing to leave home turf. NASA’s Voyager 1 has seemed on the verge of exiting our solar system for years, but new results suggest that it still has a way to go before it enters interstellar space.
The latest readings from one of the spacecraft’s instruments show that charged particles around Voyager 1 aren’t changing direction the way they should at the heliopause, the boundary between the sun’s sphere of influence and the rest of the galaxy.
This could be a sign that the craft won’t leave the solar system for up to 15 years, by which time it is expected to have run out of the power needed to communicate with Earth.
The solar system sits in a huge magnetic bubble. Solar wind containing charged particles flows outwards from the sun, only to get bent around by the magnetic field, at the heliopause.
Acrobatic turn
In 2005, Voyager 1 entered the heliosheath – the outer layer of the boundary – where the solar wind abruptly slows to a crawl. Then in 2010, readings indicated that Voyager 1 was near the heliopause because the speed of the solar wind’s outward flow dropped to zero.
But those measurements could not show whether the particles were in the process of changing direction to follow the curve of the heliopause. Getting the full picture meant turning the ageing spacecraft into an acrobat.
Beginning in 2011, mission managers commanded Voyager 1 to carry out a set of rolls, in which it rotated 70 degrees and held that orientation before returning to its previous orientation. The craft carried out a set of rolls, each lasting a few hours, once every other month for five months.
“Rolling the craft like that was an amazing thing to do,” says Voyager scientist Robert Decker. “It’s a tricky manoeuvre for such an old spacecraft.”
To the team’s surprise, the data showed little to no change in the wind’s direction.