Emily LakdawallaDec 10, 2007

Voyager in the Kitchen Sink

Last year at the International Space Development Conference I saw a talk given by Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone on the Voyager Interstellar mission, in which I enthused about a visual analogy he made to explain the different parts of the space environment being explored by the Voyager spacecraft. During today's press conference on Voyager 2 reaching the termination shock (which you can read about through that link to an article by A. J. S. Rayl), he showed the video again, and the American Geophysical Union was kind enough to post it on their website. You can watch the video here; the image below is a still.

The Voyagers' journey in a kitchen sink

The Voyagers' journey in a kitchen sink
Voyager project scientist Ed Stone captured a video of water in his kitchen sink (AVI format, 2.1 MB) as a visual analogy for the plasma environments encountered by the Voyagers.
Voyagers at the edge of the solar system

JPL / NASA

Voyagers at the edge of the solar system
Our solar system exists inside a heliosphere, a bubble created by the outward flow of the solar wind. The region that separates our system from interstellar space is the heliopause. In between these is the termination shock, where the solar wind slows from supersonic to subsonic speeds.

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