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Voyager 1 will exit solar system soon, is so close to the void it can taste it
Endurance: it's important in every race, including the space race, even though many pundits would argue that it kind of fizzled a long time ago. Thirty-three years prior to now, NASA's Voyager 1 began its journey to check in on the outer planets. It accomplished that goal in 1989, and has since moved on to bigger and better things -- you know, like leaving the solar system. Ten billion miles away, Voyager 1's Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument is spitting out "solid zeroes," which means it's not detecting any more outward movement from solar winds. The heliopause (read: the official edge of the solar system) is just a few short years away for the radioactive-powered spacecraft, which is frightening to think about regardless of your experience in Space Camp. What will happen once it enters interstellar space? We're not sure, but we're trying to set up radio comms with its earth-bound synthesizer progeny for some kind of freaky space jam. We'll keep you posted. [Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech]
Astronomers theorize what it's like when worlds (and black holes) collide
Tight binary solar systems are inhabited in science fiction -- remember the Star Wars world of Tatooine -- but humanity might find such planets inhospitable over the long term, and not just because of the heat. Using NASA's Spitzer telescope, scientists discovered clouds of dust around three such binary systems far too recent to come from the stars themselves, and theorize that as the stars attract one another over time and get closer and closer together, their respective orbiting planets may get closer as well, and crash into one another catastrophically. Meanwhile, when supermassive black holes dance in pairs, they can merge as one, and astrophysicists have recently simulated how such a joining might appear on our telescopes. According to a team of US and Canadian researchers, the pair may emit strong jets of electromagnetic radiation before they merge, which twist around one another and throw off gravitational waves that can help pinpoint the source. Speaking of sources, we've got plenty of those immediately below if you'd like to read more.
NASA gives Voyager 2 a RAM reset, fixes communication bug
NASA's finished successfully resetting the computer system of the Voyager 2 satellite, which had begun transmitting unintelligible data in mid-April. The Voyager 2 was launched in August of 1977 to study Saturn, and has also flown past Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. It's now around 8.6 billion miles from earth, in the heliosphere which surrounds the solar system. While the cause of the glitch is unknown, NASA officials say that they noticed on May 12th that a single memory location had been changed from a 0 to a 1, causing all transmissions to be completely garbled. After the reset, Voyager 2 resumed transmission of data on May 22nd -- and continues its journey to leave the solar system entirely.
Star Trek-style deflector shield to fend off harmful radiation
When you've got folks dreaming up such things as a $2.5 trillion "space sunshade," we reckon a Star Trek-style deflector shield isn't too far-fetched. Apparently, a team of British scientists are looking into the possibility of crafting such a device in order to " protect astronauts from radiation" when they venture beyond the Earth's protective magnetic envelope, or "magnetosphere." Reportedly, the team is hoping to "to mimic the magnetic field which protects the Earth" and deploy the shields "around spacecraft and on the surfaces of planets to deflect harmful energetic particles." As nation's begin to revive plans of space exploration, the homegrown shield should look mighty attractive at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting, but details concerning a proposed launch date, and moreover, the presumably lofty pricetag, have yet to emerge.[Via Slashdot]
Explosive data mining robots could be sent to hazardous asteroids
Sending robotic creatures into space has become somewhat of a worldwide pastime, but sending explosive robots to take care of multiple acts of business is what Dennis Ebbets of Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado has on his mind. In a recent presentation given to the American Astronomical Society, Mr. Ebbets described a fleet of robotic probes small and cheap enough to "investigate a near-Earth asteroid's composition and structure." The devices would be battery-powered and would only be useful for a matter of days, but during the time it was on the asteroid, it would collect data of the surface, explode, and allow other still-in-tact siblings to "listen for vibrations that could reveal the object's inner structure." Considering that NASA has compiled a list of over 800 asteroids that could be potentially dangerous to our planet due to their orbit, these exploding bots would serve a dual purpose as they erupted on the surface to break up the asteroid or veer it off course, all while collecting precious data about the "inner structures" of these mysterious rocks. Although funding still isn't guaranteed for the volatile critters to take off just yet, as many as six of the 12-kilograms probes could loaded onto a single spacecraft and launched to its destination "relatively cheaply," and if things go as planned, we could see the first of these gizmos gettin' dirty by 2011.
