AstroTalk Episode March 28, 2019

Humans Back to the Moon. Review of Voyager missions entering Interstellar Space. A Space Butterfly in Space Studied by the Spitzer Space Telescope..

2:00pm - 2:56pm

NASA is going back to the Moon with its Gateway mission. NASA is putting US astronauts back on the moon within 5 years. NASA will go their on the Orion spacecraft. The moon has a very important and stabilizing influence on the Earth. The Voyager mission has now placed its 2 spacecraft V1 & V2 in interstellar space (IS). Voyager 2's magnetometer and other cosmic ray telescopes on-board are making measurements of the IS it is now in. The high energy particles that were expected in IS are present, The low energy particles were also present before V 2 crossed into IS. Hubble and the Spitzer Space telescope are looking at a nebula, W40, called the butterfly, which is 1,400 light years away. the images are in infrared and x-ray. The lit up nebula glowing in different colors. To the right of W40 is another cluster of stars, known as Serpens South.