Rosine Lallement is a French researcher at the Paris Observatory and a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. [1] [2] Lallement studies the heliosphere and interstellar medium. [3] In her research, she has helped demonstrate that the motion of the interstellar cloud outside the heliosphere is identical to that of interstellar helium inside the heliosphere. [1] She is a member of the IAU. [4]
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data are provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 165.9 AU from Earth as of November 2024, it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. The probe made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. NASA had a choice of either doing a Pluto or Titan flyby; exploration of the moon took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.
The stellar atmosphere is the outer region of the volume of a star, lying above the stellar core, radiation zone and convection zone.
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 the closest of celestial neighbours and among others, the Local Interstellar Cloud, the neighbouring G-Cloud, the Ursa Major moving group and the Hyades. It is estimated to be at least 1000 light years in size, 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 (0.5 atoms/cm3), and one sixth that of the Local Interstellar Cloud (0.3 atoms/cm3).
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it 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 the Milky Way. As part of the interplanetary magnetic field, the heliosphere shields the Solar System from significant amounts of cosmic ionizing radiation; uncharged gamma rays are, however, not affected. Its name was likely coined by Alexander J. Dessler, who is credited with the first use of the word in the 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 an interstellar cloud roughly 30 light-years (9.2 pc) across, through which the Solar System is moving. This feature overlaps with a region around the Sun referred to as the solar neighborhood. It is unknown whether the Sun is embedded in the Local Interstellar Cloud, or is in the region where the Local Interstellar Cloud is interacting with the neighboring G-Cloud. Like the G-Cloud and others, the LIC is part of the Very Local Interstellar Medium which begins where the heliosphere and interplanetary medium end, the furthest that probes have traveled.
Venkataraman Radhakrishnan was an Indian space scientist and Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member. He retired from his career as professor emeritus of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India, of which he had previously been director from 1972 to 1994 and which is named after his father. He served on various committees in various capacities including as the vice president of the International Astronomical Union during 1988–1994. He was also a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was an Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.
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.
Interstellar Boundary Explorer 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 launch vehicle on 19 October 2008.
A helium focusing cone is a concentration of helium atoms that has passed through the Sun's heliosphere and is concentrated in a conical region on the opposite side from where the particles entered.
Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of four curator/professors in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) 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 exoplanets and studying their composition, with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.
Stamatios (Tom) Mike Krimizis is a Greek-American scientist in space exploration. He has contributed to many of the United States' unmanned space exploration programs of the Solar System and beyond. He has contributed to exploration missions to almost every planet of the Solar System. In 1999, the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid 8323 Krimigis in his honor.
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.
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, which is currently scheduled to launch on 29 April 2025. IMAP will be a Sun-tracking spin-stabilized satellite in orbit about the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange 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 studying 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.
Merav Opher is a professor of astronomy at Boston University known for her work on the heliosphere, the cocoon formed by the wind emanated from the Sun as it travels in the Galaxy. In 2021 she was named a William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Shensuo, formerly Interstellar Express, is a proposed Chinese National Space Administration program designed to explore the heliosphere and interstellar space. The program will feature two or three space probes that were initially planned to be launched in 2024 and follow differing trajectories to encounter Jupiter to assist them out of the Solar System. The first probe, IHP-1, will travel toward the nose of the heliosphere, while the second probe, IHP-2, will fly near to the tail, skimming by Neptune and Triton in January 2038. There may be another probe—tentatively IHP-3—which would launch in 2030 to explore to the northern half of the heliosphere. IHP-1 and IHP-2 would be the sixth and seventh spacecraft to leave the Solar System, as well as first non-NASA probes to achieve this status.
Interstellar Probe (ISP) is a proposed NASA space probe designed to explore and characterize the heliosphere and interstellar space. The study was originally proposed in 2018 by NASA for the Applied Physics Laboratory. It would have a baseline launch between 2036 and 2041. The probe would launch on a direct hyperbolic trajectory to encounter Jupiter after six to seven months, after which the probe would travel at a speed of about 6–7 astronomical units (900,000,000–1.05×109 kilometres) per year, leaving the heliosphere after only 16 years.
Susan Lepri is an American space scientist and is currently Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She led development of portions of the Heavy Ion Sensor (HIS) which was launched onboard the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter mission in February 2020. She has been director of the University of Michigan Space Physics Research Laboratory (SPRL) since 2021.
Cristina Hemilse Mandrini is an Argentinian solar physicist. She is currently a researcher at the Argentinian National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires.