Hubble provides interstellar road map for Voyagers' galactic trek January 6, 2017 by Felicia Chou Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! In this artist's conception, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has a bird's-eye view of the solar system. The circles represent the orbits of the major outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 visited the planets Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft is now 13 billion miles from Earth, making it the farthest and fastest-moving human-made object ever built. In fact, Voyager 1 is now zooming through interstellar space, the region between the stars that is filled with gas, dust, and material recycled from dying stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) NASA's two Voyager spacecraft are hurtling through unexplored territory on their road trip beyond our solar system. Along the way, they are measuring the interstellar medium, the mysterious environment between stars. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is providing the road map - by measuring the material along the probes' future trajectories. Even after the Voyagers run out of electrical power and are unable to send back new data, which may happen in about a decade, astronomers can use Hubble observations to characterize the environment of through which these silent ambassadors will glide. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2017-01-hubble-interstellar-road-voyagers-galactic.html#jCp excerpt: NASA launched the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977. Both explored the outer planets Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune. The pioneering Voyager spacecraft are currently exploring the outermost edge of the sun's domain . Voyager 1 is now zooming through interstellar space, the region between the stars that is filled with gas, dust, and material recycled from dying stars. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! In this illustration oriented along the ecliptic plane, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope looks along the paths of NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they journey through the solar system and into interstellar space. Hubble is gazing at two sight lines (the twin cone-shaped features) along each spacecraft's path. The telescope's goal is to help astronomers map interstellar structure along each spacecraft's star-bound route. Each sight line stretches several light-years to nearby stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI) Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2017-01-hubble-interstellar-road-voyagers-galactic.html#jCp
Voyager 2 is still the only probe to have visited with close encounters, the two outer icy gas giants of Uranus and Neptune.
Were are they with respect to the edge of our galaxy, since we are supposedly at the edge and in the upper part of the disc
Where did you get that from? We are situated in the outer edges of a spiral arm away from any central disk. Plus of course our galaxy being approximately 100,000 L/Years across and varies in thickness depending how far from the central bulge, but between 1000 and 2000 L/Years thick. It will be a long ling time before we ever are close to leaving the galaxy. 0Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
