Fargeek

You're out near Jupiter in an old spaceship. It's cold, very cold. Your power supplies are waning. Parts of your ship are already below freezing. The fuel lines could freeze at any moment. And your flight doesn't end for four more years.

You're the NASA/European Space Agency spacecraft Ulysses. And you're actually a tremendous success story.

Ulysses was launched in 1990 on a five-year mission to study the sun. The craft gathered new data about the speed and direction of the solar wind. It discovered the 3D shape of the sun's magnetic field. It recorded solar flares on the sun, and super-solar flares from distant neutron stars. Ulysses even flew through the tail of comet Hyakutake, an unexpected encounter that delighted astronomers.

The mission was supposed to end in 1995, but Ulysses was too successful to quit. NASA and the ESA have granted three extensions, most recently in Feb. 2004. Ulysses is scheduled to keep going until 2008, thirteen years longer than originally planned.

The craft is still studying the Sun but now it's out by Jupiter and its temperature is dangerously low. If the scientists at ESA and NASA can keep it going for another three years, by then it will be back close enough to the Sun to be out of danger.

Mission scientist Steve Suess at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center believes it's worth the effort. "The extended mission gives us a chance to learn a lot more about the sun." Of special interest is the Solar Minimum. Solar activity waxes and wanes every 11 years, he explains. Ulysses studied the sun's quiet phase, Solar Minimum, between 1994 and 1995. Now Ulysses gets to do it again. "The next Solar Minimum is due around 2006," says Suess, "but it won't be the same as before." In 2001 the sun's magnetic field flipped. The north pole shifted south, and vice versa. Magnetically speaking, the sun is now upside down. How will that affect Solar Minimum?

Yes, the Sun's magnetic field can flip, just like the Earth's. Cool stuff, eh?