https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/1 ... liosphere/
I only bring this up because …Voyager 1 Confirms Electric Heliosphere
By B Talbott
Mission scientists on NASA’s Voyager 1 mission have reported the discovery of “a new layer of the solar system that scientists hadn’t known was there.” The scientists are calling the region Voyager 1 has entered a “magnetic highway,” where “charged particles from inside the heliosphere …flow outward,” and cosmic rays come in. The long-standing view of the heliosphere as an electrically neutral and isolated “bubble” can no longer be maintained.
One scientist quoted on Newscientist.com says of these findings:
“Everything we’ve seen [from Voyager] is not what we expected to see”… “People have been working on this for a long time. Just about every expectation we’ve had has been confounded so far.”
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voy ... s-to-earth
What the engineers managed to do is remarkable. The fact that the both Voyager spacecraft are still operating after over 46 years in space is amazing! Now whether the data they’re getting from the voyagers is worth the effort to keep them running is another issue.For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). … snip …
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. … snip … Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
Maybe it is, given that in Wikipedia says that in 2020 "a significant unexpected increase in density in the space beyond the Solar System" was "detected by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes," implying that "the density gradient is a large-scale feature of the VLISM (very local interstellar medium) in the general direction of the heliospheric nose.” Also in 2021 “NASA reported on the continuous measurement, for the first time, of the density of material in interstellar space". But In 2021 Wikipedia notes that NASA also reported that Voyager detected "interstellar sounds for the first time.”
In my opinion, claiming interstellar space has sound and that the sound tells up something we really need to know seem to show a certain desperation for purpose that perhaps means the program may be close to over in terms of scientific usefulness. Just saying ...
