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The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of the objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest are the eight planets, with the remainder being smaller objects, the dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly—the moons—two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury.
Voyager 1 is a space probe that was launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. Having operated for 42 years, 10 months and 17 days as of July 23, 2020, the spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data is provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 148.61 AU from Earth as of March 12, 2020, it is the most distant man-made object from Earth.
The Local Bubble, or Local Cavity, is a relative cavity in the interstellar medium (ISM) of the Orion Arm in the Milky Way. It contains among others, the Local Interstellar Cloud, which contains the Solar System, and the G-Cloud. It is at least 300 light years across and is defined by its neutral-hydrogen density of about 0.05 atoms/cm3, or approximately one tenth of the average for the ISM in the Milky Way, and one sixth that of the Local Interstellar Cloud.
The heliosphere is the vast, bubble-like region of space which surrounds and is created by the Sun. In plasma physics terms, this is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is continuously "inflated" by plasma originating from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Outside the heliosphere, this solar plasma gives way to the interstellar plasma permeating our galaxy. Radiation levels inside and outside the heliosphere differ; in particular, the galactic cosmic rays are less abundant inside the heliosphere, so that the planets inside are partly shielded from their impact. The word "heliosphere" is said to have been coined by Alexander J. Dessler, who is credited with first use of the word in scientific literature in 1967. The scientific study of the heliosphere is heliophysics, which includes space weather and space climate.
The Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC), also known as the Local Fluff, is the interstellar cloud roughly 30 light-years (9.2 pc) across, through which the Solar System is moving. It is unknown if the Sun is embedded in the Local Interstellar Cloud, or in the region where the Local Interstellar Cloud is interacting with the neighboring G-Cloud.
An interstellar probe is a space probe that has left—or is expected to leave—the Solar System and enter interstellar space, which is typically defined as the region beyond the heliopause. It also refers to probes capable of reaching other star systems.
Doris Daou is a Lebanese-born astronomer from Canada who was formerly the Director for Education and Public Outreach of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and the Associate Director of the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI), and is currently the program contact for NASA's "Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx)".
Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is a NASA satellite in Earth orbit that uses Energetic Neutral Atoms (ENAs) to image the interaction region between the Solar System and interstellar space. The mission is part of NASA's Small Explorer program and was launched with a Pegasus-XL rocket on October 19, 2008.
Joan Feynman is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields; sun-Earth relations; and magnetospheric physics. In particular, Feynman is known for developing an understanding of the origin of auroras. She is also known for creating a model that predicts the number of high-energy particles likely to hit a spacecraft over its lifetime, and for uncovering a method for predicting sunspot cycles.
Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of three curators in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist. She investigates planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Her optics laboratory is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle the problem of directly seeing and taking spectra of nearby solar systems with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.
Energetic neutral atom (ENA) imaging, often described as "seeing with atoms", is a technology used to create global images of otherwise invisible phenomena in the magnetospheres of planets and throughout the heliosphere, even to its outer boundary. This constitutes the far-flung edge of the solar system.
Eberhard Grün is a German planetary scientist specialized in cosmic dust research. He is an active emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics , Heidelberg (Germany), research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder (Colorado), and was a Professor at the University of Heidelberg until his retirement in 2007. Eberhard Grün has a leading role in international cosmic dust science since over 30 years.
The Heliophysics Science Division of the Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA) conducts research on the Sun, its extended solar system environment, and interactions of Earth, other planets, small bodies, and interstellar gas with the heliosphere. Division research also encompasses geospace—Earth's uppermost atmosphere, the ionosphere, and the magnetosphere—and the changing environmental conditions throughout the coupled heliosphere.
Interstellar Probe is the name of a 1999 space probe concept by NASA intended to travel out 200 AU in 15 years. This 1999 study by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is noted for its circular 400 meters diameter, solar sail as a propulsion method combined with a 0.25 AU flyby of the Sun to achieve higher solar light pressure, after which the sail is jettisoned at 5 AU distance from the Sun.
Cosmic Ray Subsystem is an instrument aboard the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft of the NASA Voyager program, and it is an experiment to detect cosmic rays. The CRS includes a High-Energy Telescope System (HETS), Low-Energy Telescope System (LETS), and The Electron Telescope (TET). It is designed to detect energetic particles and some of the requirements were for the instrument to be reliable and to have enough charge resolution. It can also detect the energetic particles like protons from the Galaxy or Earth's Sun.
The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe(IMAP) is a heliophysics mission that will simultaneously investigate two important and coupled science topics in the heliosphere: the acceleration of energetic particles and interaction of the solar wind with the local interstellar medium. These science topics are coupled because particles accelerated in the inner heliosphere play crucial roles in the outer heliospheric interaction. In 2018, NASA selected a team led by David J. McComas of Princeton University to implement the mission. The planned launch for IMAP is in October 2024. IMAP will be a Sun-tracking spin-stabilized satellite in orbit about the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrangian point with a science payload of ten instruments. IMAP will also continuously broadcast real-time in-situ data that can be used for space weather prediction.
NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP) is a series of missions focused on study the Sun-Earth system. It is part of NASA's Heliophysics Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate.
Gloria Dubner is an Argentinian astrophysicist and Director of the Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio in Buenos Aires and a Senior Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council. She is known for her research on supernovas.
Plasma Wave Subsystem, abbreviated PWS, is an instrument that is on board the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 unmanned probes of the Voyager program. The device is 16 channel step frequency receiver and a low-frequency waveform receiver that can measure electron density. The PWS uses the two long antenna in a V-shape on the spacecraft, which are also used by another instrument on the spacecraft. The instrument recorded data about the Solar system's gas giants, and about the outer reaches of the Heliosphere, and beyond. In the 2010s the PWS was used to play the "sounds of interstellar space" as the spacecraft can sample the local interstellar medium after they departed the Sun's heliosphere. The heliosphere is a region essentially under the influence of the Sun's solar wind, rather than the local interstellar environment, and is another way of understanding the Solar system in comparison to the objects gravitationally bound around Earth's Sun.
References
- 1 2 "Rosine Lallement". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
- ↑ "NASA - Presenter Bio: Rosine Lallement". www.nasa.gov. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
- ↑ "International Astronomical Union | IAU". www.iau.org. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
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