Seeking the Edge of the Solar System

In September and August, respectively, 2002, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft will observe their 25th anniversaries in space, continuing to perform long after their original mission to visit the Jupiter and Saturn systems. After Voyager 1's encounter with the two gas giants, it was aimed upward out of the plane of the ecliptic.  Voyager 2, after its visit at Jupiter and Saturn, was given two more planetary destinations, Uranus and Neptune.  It completed its "grand tour" of the outer planets in 1989.  It was then aimed downward out of the ecliptic plane. 

Now, at about 85 AU, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object.  Round-trip light time is 24 hours.  Voyager 2 is at about 68 AU.  Their mission now is to study the heliosphere, the vast bubble of space within the Sun's influence, and the heliopause, the boundary of the solar system with interstellar space.  At the heliopause, the outward pressure exerted by the solar wind balances the inward pressure of the interstellar wind.  The region where solar wind particles begin piling up against the heliopause is the termination shock, where the solar wind should drop from about 1,500,000 kilometers (nearly 1,000,000 miles) per hour to 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour. Voyager 1 is already detecting a slowing of the solar wind from the pressure of inbound interstellar particles leaking through the heliopause.

No one knows exactly how much farther Voyager 1 must travel to reach the termination shock or the heliopause.  Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager Project Scientist since mission inception, estimates that the spacecraft could reach the termination shock within three years. Once there, Dr. Stone predicts it will still have about 5 billion to 8 billion kilometers (3 billion to 5 billion miles) and 10 to 15 years to go before actually crossing the heliopause into interstellar space. Because the heliosphere expands and contracts with the level of solar activity and the inward pressure of the interstellar wind is uncertain, it is very difficult for scientists to estimate the actual extent of the heliosphere.

Read more about the Voyager mission to find the heliopause at http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/. For children, go to http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/vgr_fact1.htm to read about the Voyagers' grand tour of the outer planets and find out the secret code they use to send pictures back from space.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.