NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer mission, or
IBEX, successfully launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific
Ocean at 1:47 p.m. EDT, Sunday. IBEX will be the first spacecraft to
image and map dynamic interactions taking place in the outer solar
system.
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. The operations team is
continuing to check out spacecraft subsystems.
"After a 45-day orbit raising and spacecraft checkout period, the
spacecraft will start its exciting science mission, " said IBEX
mission manager Greg Frazier of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md.
Just as an impressionist artist makes an image from countless tiny
strokes of paint, IBEX will build an image of the outer boundary of
the solar system from impacts on the spacecraft by high-speed
particles called energetic neutral atoms. These particles are created
in the boundary region when the 1-million mph solar wind blows out in
all directions from the sun and plows into the gas of interstellar
space. This region is important to study because it shields many of
the dangerous cosmic rays that would flood the space around Earth.
"No one has seen an image of the interaction at the edge of our solar
system where the solar wind collides with interstellar space, " said
IBEX Principal Investigator David McComas of the Southwest Research
Institute in San Antonio. "We know we're going to be surprised. It's
a little like getting the first weather satellite images. Prior to
that, you had to infer the global weather patterns from a limited
number of local weather stations. But with the weather satellite
images, you could see the hurricanes forming and the fronts
developing and moving across the country."
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.
For more information about the IBEX mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ibex
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AFTER 35 years at Columbia University, where he was chairman of the astronomy department and co-director of the Astrophysics Laboratory, David J. Helfand is on leave to serve as president of Quest University Canada, a tiny liberal arts college in British Columbia that graduated its first class last spring. It is Canada's only private, secular...
