![]() Several researchers from MIT are working directly with data from the Voyager 2 plasma instrument. Voyager 1 is 13 billion miles from Earth and crossed into the interstellar medium in 2012, but its plasma instrument is no longer functioning. With their initial missions achieved and expanded, the spacecraft have continued outward toward the edges of the solar system for the past four decades today they are the most distant human-made objects from Earth. The twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the solar system's gas giant planets. In an historic feat for the mission, Voyager 2's plasma instrument, developed at MIT in the 1970s, is set to make the first direct measurements of the interstellar plasma. These accelerated electrons can then ionize neutrals to produce pickup ions in the far exosphere.NASA announced today that the Voyager 2 spacecraft, some 11 billion miles from home, crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the bubble of space governed by charged particles from our sun and the interstellar medium, or material between stars, on Nov. For the first time in the case of another planet than the Earth, these observations are explained in terms of fast-Fermi process taking place at the Martian bow shock. Particularly, the features observed in the distributions are used to probe the Mars cross shock potential. We present a detailed analysis of the measurements and we show that the observations are consistent with a coherent encounter of the solar wind electrons with the shock. Very similar distributions are seen at the terrestrial bow shock. The loss cone distribution is a salient feature of these backstreaming electrons. These spikes are associated with sunward propagating electrons and appear when the interplanetary field lines threading the spacecraft is connected near the Martian bow shock tangency point. Upstream of the bow shock of Mars, MAVEN spacecraft observations show electron flux spikes with energy up to 1.5 keV.
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