Don't remember if this was picked up on before, thought I'd mention it.
http://www-dcfightsback-org.dailykos.co ... /212413/58
Nice to see the Voyageur spacecraft still chugging along, spitting out data.
Solar Magnetosphere
Solar Magnetosphere
CHoff
One news article I'd seen said Voyager II was encountering a magnetic field about twice what was expected, and tilted about 30 degrees from the galactic plane (it was expected to align).
I tryed to look up exactly what field it was measuring. There are files on the official Voyager websites with nearly real-time data up to sometime in 2007, but evidently they stopped updating it. I just confirmed this by accessing the website below. It returns data for year 2007, but not later. The levels show a single conspicuous spike at about 0.35 nT late in the year.
http://cohoweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/form/voyager2.html
The characterization of "strong" is relative. One poster above cites about 5 microgauss, where Earth's field is about 0.6 gauss. Converting to the units I normally use for magnetometers for Earth's field, we're talking half a nanotesla. This level would be a challenge for them to even detect with their triaxial fluxgate, and with the instruments I typically use in the lab I only resolve 1 nT. They can probably resolve a hundredth or so of that level with the more sensitive instruments, but determining direction is a challenge with the proton precession instruments.
This "strong" magnetic field is evidently almost, but not quite, zero.
I tryed to look up exactly what field it was measuring. There are files on the official Voyager websites with nearly real-time data up to sometime in 2007, but evidently they stopped updating it. I just confirmed this by accessing the website below. It returns data for year 2007, but not later. The levels show a single conspicuous spike at about 0.35 nT late in the year.
http://cohoweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/form/voyager2.html
The characterization of "strong" is relative. One poster above cites about 5 microgauss, where Earth's field is about 0.6 gauss. Converting to the units I normally use for magnetometers for Earth's field, we're talking half a nanotesla. This level would be a challenge for them to even detect with their triaxial fluxgate, and with the instruments I typically use in the lab I only resolve 1 nT. They can probably resolve a hundredth or so of that level with the more sensitive instruments, but determining direction is a challenge with the proton precession instruments.
This "strong" magnetic field is evidently almost, but not quite, zero.