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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The Ulysses solar probe will cease operations around July 1 after nearly 18 years in outer space, NASA announced Thursday. The U.S.-European spacecraft has been suffering from a decline in its plutonium power for some time. Despite conservation measures by ground controllers, the power has dwindled to the point where thruster fuel soon will freeze up. Ulysses already has surpassed its expected lifetime by almost four times, traveling 5.4 billion miles since its launch aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1990. "When the last bits of data finally arrive, it surely will be tough to say goodbye,"...

Artist concept of Ulysses making a north polar pass. (Credit: NASA/JPL) The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a rare flyby of the sun's north pole. Unlike any other spacecraft, Ulysses is able to sample winds at the sun's poles, which are difficult to study from Earth. Ulysses has flown over the sun's poles three times before, in 1994-95, 2000-01 and 2007. Last week, solar physicists announced the first indications of a new solar cycle. Visiting the pole at this time may lead to new insights about solar activity. "This is a wonderful opportunity to examine the sun's north pole within...

During solar maximum, when the Sun's activity is at a peak in its 11 year cycle, the polarity of its magnetic field changes: the north pole takes on the polarity of the south pole and vice versa. Now, for the first time ever, a spacecraft has witnessed this process from a front-row seat high above the Sun's south pole... Andre Balogh, from Imperial College, London, who is Principal Investigator for the Ulysses magnetometer, says: ..."Clearly, a struggle is going on in the Sun's magnetic field, with freshly emerging new polarity regions racing towards the polar regions, encountering the slowly decaying...

Like many I was glued to the television in the days following the tragic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. As it happened, I tended to tune to FOX. In those first days when FOX finally started to insert commercial breaks, they introduced those breaks with a series of inspirational quotes. One blurb they used time and time again was: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. – Alfred Lord Tennyson” Most will recognize this as the last line of Tennyson’s masterful work “Ulysses.” The full thought is “. . . . and tho' we are ...