{"id":186860,"date":"2013-09-12T21:32:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-13T02:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/09\/12\/buh-bye-3\/"},"modified":"2013-09-12T21:32:00","modified_gmt":"2013-09-13T02:32:00","slug":"buh-bye-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/09\/12\/buh-bye-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Buh Bye!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Voyager 1 is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/09\/13\/science\/in-a-breathtaking-first-nasa-craft-exits-the-solar-system.html\">now officially in interstellar space<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">By today\u2019s standards, the spacecraft\u2019s technology is laughable: it carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a low-end iPhone. When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn, and everything after that was gravy.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But Voyager 1 has become \u2014 thrillingly \u2014 the Little Spacecraft That Could. On Thursday, scientists declared that it had become the first probe to exit the solar system, a breathtaking achievement that NASA could only fantasize about back when Voyager was launched in 1977, the same year \u201cStar Wars\u201d was released.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The lonely probe, which is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 miles per hour, has long been on the cusp, treading a boundary between the bubble of hot, energetic particles around the solar system and the dark region beyond. There, in interstellar space, the plasma, or ionized gas, is noticeably denser.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Dr. Gurnett and his team have spent the past few months analyzing their data, trying to nail down whether what they were seeing was solar plasma or the plasma of interstellar space. Now they are certain it was the latter, and have even pinpointed a date for the crossing: Aug. 25, 2012.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kewl!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Voyager 1 is now officially in interstellar space: By today\u2019s standards, the spacecraft\u2019s technology is laughable: it carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a low-end iPhone. When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn, and everything after that was gravy.But Voyager &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154,1036,1069,1037],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-nasa","category-science","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186860"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}