NASA launches IBEX to Explore Outer Solar System
By admin on October 20, 2008 at 5:25 amOn Sunday, NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer mission, or IBEX, successfully launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean at 1:47 p.m. EDT. It was dropped from under the wing of an L-1011 aircraft. The spacecraft separated from the third stage of its Pegasus launch vehicle at 1:53 p.m. and immediately began powering up components necessary to control onboard systems. IBEX will be the first spacecraft to image and map dynamic interactions taking place in the outer solar system.
IBEX
During the two-year mission, IBEX’s main objective is to discover the global interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium. The winds, made of magnetically charged particles, have fallen to the weakest level in half a century. IBEX will achieve this objective by taking a set of global energetic neutral atom (ENA) images of the outer boundary of the solar system from impacts on the spacecraft by high-speed particles called energetic neutral atoms. The outer boundary or interstellar boundary of the solar system is important, because it shields many of the dangerous cosmic rays that would flood the space around Earth.
IBEX is the latest in NASA’s series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. The Southwest Research Institute developed the IBEX mission with a team of national and international partners. Goddard manages the Explorers Program for the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
via: IBEX
[...] Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, that was launched in October 2008, has made it possible for scientists to [...]