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July 2, 2009
Winged Wraith
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next  The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), attached to its winged Pegasus booster, falls from the belly of an Orbital Sciences Corporation L-1011 over the Pacific Ocean near the Kwajalein Atoll. The launch took place in the dark, early morning hours of Sunday, October 19, 2008, as revealed in this grainy frame grab from a video camera mounted under the L-1011's belly. The Pegasus boosted the 23x38-inch satellite 60 miles high. IBEX's own solid rocket motor then propelled the 233-pound craft to an elliptical orbit as high as 200,000 miles--almost as far as the moon--to place it beyond the interference of Earth's magnetic field. There the craft will study a mysterious "boundary" far beyond Pluto where turbulent gas and writhing magnetic fields, called the termination shock, mark the point where the solar wind piles up against the gas of interstellar space and sends high-speed atoms radiating back toward Earth. Six months from now, IBEX will have observed the entire sky and mapped the full structure of the termination shock for the first time.(Photo: NASA |
