NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft was successfully launched from near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean at 1:47 p.m. ET on Sunday. The IBEX was soared into space aboard a Pegasus rocket to explore the edge of the solar system. This is actually the first time a spacecraft has explored these far regions where solar wind smashes into the gases from outside the solar system.

The importance of the experiment is rather high, as these gases are very dangerous and their real activity should be studied somehow for protection. The solar wind is at its lowest pressure in 50 years and thus our solar system may be less protected.

“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 David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, the mission's principal investigator.
The probe is as big as a bus tire ( it is octagonal in shape and measures 23 inches high and 38 inches across; it weighs 1,016 pounds) and it will eventually end up more than 200,000 miles above Earth's surface before it begins collecting data. This will probably last about 45 days and it is also known as the "checkout period."

"The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," McComas also said.

IBEX will be on a two-year mission that will involve photographing and charting various areas throughout the solar system.
Similar attempts were made back in 2004 and 2007 when the two Voyager probes crossed the same boundary. They reached the solar wind area almost three decades after their launches from Earth. The Voyagers send back the intriguing information that the termination shock isn’t a fixed point, but seems to fluctuate due to gusts in the solar wind. In fact the two Voyager spacecrafts, launched in 1977, are currently in the "termination shock" zone, where the particles from the Sun crash into those from interstellar space.

If Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally completes the passage through the boundary of our stellar system, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium, which may provide clues relevant to the origin and overall nature of the Universe. At this distance, signals from Voyager 1 take more than fourteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a joint project of NASA and CalTech in La Cañada Flintridge, California.

The $165 million IBEX mission is spearheaded by McComas and his research team at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. IBEX will be able to study incoming cosmic rays and outbound solar particles, in an attempt to allow researchers to better understand what happens there.