It’s the scientific consensus that, out at the edge of the solar system, Voyager 1 has crossed the termination shock — possibly again — and is now sailing through the heliosheath, the outer layer of our sun’s bubble of influence. That far from the sun, the solar wind “bunches up” as it slows down against the pressure of the interstellar wind, causing an increase in temperature, and in the density of the magnetic field around Voyager.

It’s hoped that the Voyagers will continue operating long enough to reach the heliopause, that point at which the solar wind starts streaming backward into the sun’s wake, and punch through into true interstellar space. More from the Voyager home page about those outer layers.

The earlier probe Pioneer 10, by the way, is flying in the opposite direction, into the heliosphere, the sun’s wake trailing behind it as it moves through the interstellar medium. Sadly, we lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003.

The science and imagery coming out of Cassini at Saturn is simply staggering and beautiful.

• First full panorama of Titan’s surface from the descending Huygens probe. (previous imagery here.)
• Enceladus and the Rings almost edge-on.
• Dione and the Rings.
• Enceladus and the Rings again.
• Titan’s Mysterious Red Spot.
• Wide angle shot of Saturn’s southern hemisphere.

Wow. Now that almost* makes the NASA-allocated tax dollars worth it, doesn’t it? More imagery from the Saturn Family on the Planetary Photojournal.

* “Almost,” because we haven’t gone back to the moon or landed on Mars yet. But we’ll get there.

On Mars, Opportunity is literally spinning its wheels, carefully extricating itself from the deep sand dune it’s been stuck in for the last few weeks. The rover was going backwards at the time — they alternate forward and reverse driving due to wheel well lubrication issues — so now the rover is actually moving “forward” out of the dune.

I took images from Opportunity’s front and rear hazcams in the raw image gallery and animated them, for an idea of the rover’s progress: front view, rear view (1MB animated GIFs). Note that these are over the span of several days, which is why the shadows keep changing.

JPL also has a closeup video of Opportunity’s left front wheel spinning in the soil.

Update: Unstuck!