Scientists in the U.S. and China envision launching high-speed spacecraft on aspirational multigenerational voyages into the great unknown of interstellar space.
Right now our solar system is barreling into a region of space that we know next to nothing about. For about 60,000 years, our sun has been traversing the local interstellar cloud , a region of gas and dust within a mostly empty bubble that was carved out of the Milky Way by supernovae millions of years ago. In as little as 2,000 years, however, our star’s sphere of influence will move on to uncharted space.
The upcoming U.S.-based Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey is expected to help dictate which missions NASA and other federal agencies should be focused on for a 10-year period between the early 2020s and the 2030s. APL hopes that the report will direct NASA to develop the Interstellar Probe. Geopolitical conflicts between the U.S.
“I’m a strong supporter,” says Don Gurnett, a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa and former principal investigator of the plasma wave instruments on both Voyager spacecraft. “Voyager 1 will probably operate another 10 years and be at 165 AU. It’s not far enough out. We would like to go [farther] into the pristine interstellar medium.”
“The biggest mystery we have right now is ‘What is that shape of the heliosphere?’” says Elena Provornikova of APL, heliophysics lead of Interstellar Probe. An ongoing mission called the Interstellar Boundary Explorer , launched in 2008, suggested this shape is elongated. But data from the Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017 pointed to a more rounded structure without a long tail.
Interstellar Probe would have some intriguing additional goals it could tackle, too. That would include studies of Jupiter as it flew past but also potential observations of dwarf planets in the outer solar system and Kuiper belt objects consisting of asteroids and comets that are found beyond Neptune. There are “a number of different candidates,” says Alice Cocoros of APL, a payload systems engineer for the mission.
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