I spent this afternoon at a workshop on Rapid Media Prototyping, as part of ScienceOnline 2013 in Raleigh, North Carolina. So in the spirit of the session here is a rough and ready thing that I made… It’s a timeline of photos taken by both Voyager spacecraft on their trip through the outer solar system [...]

Remember when I said back in October that Voyager 1 might have finally left the solar system? Well, it turns out that the spacecraft, which has been skirting the edge of the solar system for a long time now, is finding it difficult to say goodbye. According to scientists working on the mission, Voyager 1 [...]

On its 35th birthday, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is a little closer to home than we had hoped it would be at this point. The Voyagers, 1 and 2, are right at this moment speeding away from us towards interstellar space. But a paper out in Nature today reports that, despite recently showing signs that [...]

Recent debates over whether or not the Voyager 1 spacecraft has ‘left the solar system’ typically leave out some critical details. The limits of the Sun’s particle radiation is not the physical edge of the contents of the solar system, but it is the point of changeover to the exceedingly tenuous atmosphere of matter and [...]

Tracking the location of the Voyager 1 spacecraft can be exhausting for a science journalist, and I can only imagine how confusing it gets for the interested reader. The relevant question pertaining to Voyager 1’s location is this: Has the venerable NASA spacecraft exited the heliosphere, the sun’s plasma cocoon in space, and crossed into [...]

Now that 2012 has really and truly been put to bed, let’s look at the year that was in space exploration and astronomy. My choice for #1 was a no-brainer: not only is spectacular science already rolling in, but the top space event of the year—the August landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars—also crossed [...]

Voyager 1 is going, going … not quite gone. The well-traveled NASA spacecraft, launched in 1977, is headed out of the heliosphere, the fluctuating bubble in space inflated by plasma streaming outward from the sun. For years Voyager 1 has been closing in on the heliopause—the outer edge of the heliosphere—where the solar wind meets [...]

It’s been a long, strange trip out of the solar system for NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, and it may be a bit longer still. Voyager 1, which launched 35 years ago today, has ventured farther from Earth than any other spacecraft in history. Voyager 1 is now 18.2 billion kilometers from Earth—so distant that it [...]