Heliophysics Careers:NASA Announces Voyager 2 Has Entered Interstellar Space - plus the successors to the Voyager Insterstellar Mission (IBEX and the future probe,IMAP)

If you would like to consider a career in heliophysics or just increase your knowledge of the solar system and its immediate environment,the local interstellar medium,you need to catch up with the stunning developments of recent years.So this blog will try to get you up to speed.Indeed,a major breaking news item crossed the desk today:Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere,the region of strong solar influence,and entered the interstellar medium,the influence of the other stars in the Milky Way.This is six years after its twin,Voyager 1,left the heliosphere in 2012.
Comparing data from Voyager's instruments,it has been ascertained that the spacecraft crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere,the heliopause,on 5 November 2018.The heliopause is where the tenuous,hot solar wind meets the cold,dense interstellar medium,NASA said.Voyager 1,although it was launched 16 days later than Voyager 2,crossed the heliopause in 2012 because of its different trajectory than Voyager 2.Yet one of Voyager 1's instruments gave out in 1980,long before it neared the edge of the heliosphere.That means that Voyager 2,which has the same instrument,but in working order,can provide a unique data set on the nature of the gateway to interstellar space and the local interstellar medium.This working instrument is the Plasma Science Experiment (PLE),so that Voyager 1 made the same passage with one eye shut,so to speak;while Voyager 2 is traveling with eyes wide open.This is causing excitement on the Voyager team.
In any event,on 5 November,the PLE detected a sharp drop off in the speed of solar wind particles,and there has been no solar wind flow in Voyager 2's environment since then,and hence the scientists' conclusion that Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere.
Voyager 2's other working instruments are:
1.the cosmic ray subsystem;
2.the lower charged particle instrument;and
3.the magnetometer,all of which are recording data consistent with Voyager 2's having left the heliosphere. *
According to Voyager project scientist Ed Stone:
There is still a lot to learn about the region of interstellar space immediately beyond the heliopause.*
Adds Nicola Fox,director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA headquarters:
To have the Voyagers sending back information about the edge of the Sun's influence gives us an unprecedented glimpse of truly uncharted territory.*
The new successor mission to Voyager's Interstellar Mission is IMAP,the Insterstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe,scheduled for a 2024 launch.It will investigate the heliospheric Ribbon and other phenomena with a suite of 10 instruments.Resaerchers from institutions in Poland,Switzerland and Germany will be collaborating on the mission with the US team.
In the past decade, a successor to the Voyager Interstellar Mission,NASA's IBEX spacecraft,and Voyager 1 itself,have revolutionised heliophysics with their discoveries:
1.There is no bow shock wave near the edge of the heliosphere,which was postulated for so long;
2.There is a previously unknown Ribbon in the heliosphere that is two to three times brighter than anything in the sky.It is composed of energetic neutral atoms,or ENAs,the origin of which is unknown;
3.The heliosphere has the shape of a flattened globe with four tails;not the shape of a comet with a long tail!*
At MIT,heliophysics is classified as a branch of astrophysics.