Mon, Oct 20, 2008
Latest Low-Cost Probe Lifted Off Sunday Afternoon
NASA's Interstellar Boundary
Explorer mission, or IBEX, successfully launched from the Kwajalein
Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday afternoon. 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 pm, six minutes after liftoff, 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.
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.
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