Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause at 119 AU

Assembled from 48 blocks · 2 evidence · 64 related

1. Story
2. Six years after its twin and about 2.6 AU closer to the Sun, Voyager 2 crossed the boundary with a working plasma instrument aboard. It recorded a boundary layer roughly 1.5 AU thick in which the plasma slowed, heated and roughly doubled in density, then a transition into interstellar plasma that took less than a day. The interstellar plasma outside was measured hotter than models had predicted.
3. Knowledge
4. Voyager 2
5. Heliopause
6. Very local interstellar medium
7. Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause at 119 AU
8. Connections
9. Heliopause
10. Voyager 2
11. Very local interstellar medium
12. Very local interstellar medium
13. Heliosphere
14. Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause at 121.6 AU
15. The 2012 crossing is confirmed from plasma oscillations
16. Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause at 119 AU
17. Voyager 1
18. The Grand Tour alignment
19. Multi-Hundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generator
20. DSS-43, Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex
21. Gravity assist
22. Jet Propulsion Laboratory
23. Launch Complex 41, Cape Canaveral
24. Jupiter
25. Neptune
26. Saturn
27. Uranus
28. Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS)
29. Titan IIIE-Centaur
30. Edward C. Stone
31. The Voyager Golden Record
32. The full Grand Tour is cancelled and rebuilt as a two-spacecraft mission
33. Voyager 2 launches
34. Voyager 2 closest approach to Jupiter
35. Voyager 2 passes Saturn and continues towards Uranus
36. Voyager 2 reaches Uranus — the only close encounter ever made
37. Voyager 2 passes Neptune and Triton, ending the planetary programme
38. Voyager 2 crosses the termination shock at about 84 AU
39. Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause at 119 AU
40. Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument is switched off
41. The "Big Bang" power manoeuvre on Voyager 2
42. Heliosphere
43. Heliopause
44. Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause at 121.6 AU
45. Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause at 119 AU
46. Evidence
47. Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause on 5 November 2018 at 119 AU; a boundary layer about 1.5 AU wide preceded it in which the plasma slowed, heated and was roughly twice as dense as typical heliosheath plasma; the transition took less than a day, and the interstellar plasma immediately outside was hotter than predicted, of order 30,000–50,000 °C against a prediction nearer 15,000–30,000 °C. V55 verification basis: the paper was not fetched — nature.com is blocked to this session — but search results carried these figures and attributed them to it.
48. NASA announced on 10 December 2018 that Voyager 2 had crossed the heliopause on 5 November 2018, confirmed by a sharp fall in solar wind particle intensity and a simultaneous rise in galactic cosmic rays measured by an instrument suite that, unlike Voyager 1's, included a working plasma science experiment. V55 verification basis: the release was not fetched; the substance is carried in search results attributing it to NASA and JPL.