krpalmer | A Long Way Out (Reply)

I was looking at the official NASA site wondering if I could find some further information on the delays to the latest space shuttle launch when I noticed a headline that Voyager 2 was beginning to cross into the complex boundary between space dominated by the solar wind and the interstellar medium. I say "complex" in part because I've been reading through the article and other related pages and I'm only just starting to get a grasp on my questions about it... and yet, beyond the science, there's a kind of poetic quality to the news as well for me. Not quite half a "light-day" away from Earth yet, and yet even after thirty years of travelling, the news gives me a sense of the spacecraft being a long, long way from home, and brings back youthful memories of reading about it passing by Jupiter and Saturn in the National Geographic and then actually being able to follow its further encounters with Uranus and Neptune in "real time," as it were. I can also recall Carl Sagan talking about living in a rare period of history, when a pantheon of moons change from points of light in telescopes to individual worlds... not that I see those remote pictures as "all I need done in space," I suppose.