Non vogliate negare l'esperienza di retro al Sol, del mondo senza gente.
Interplanetary space is nothing like the vast and tranquil void so often imagined.
The Earth swims deep inside the heliosphere, a huge cavity of the local interstellar medium filled by an outward-racing plasma of charged atoms and electrons from the Sun called the solar wind. This wind is very different from its meteorological namesake that sweeps the surface of the Earth, but its gusts and shocks, causing aurora and magnetic storms, may affect our weather and can harm satellites, power supplies and communications. In 1990 the Ulysses space probe, built by European industry for the European Space Agency, was launched by a NASA space shuttle on an unprecedented journey of discovery. The gravity of the planet Jupiter deflected it into an orbit taking it over the Sun's poles. With an array of sophisticated sensors for gauging the invisible winds, atoms, dust grains and magnetic fields that permeate space around the Sun, Ulysses passed 300 million kilometres above the Sun's southern and northern poles, a region never studied before.