William Atkins
Tuesday, 21 October 2008 19:39
Science -
Space
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On Sunday, October 19, 2008, NASA launched its Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission for a two-year mission to image the outer boundary of our solar system with interstellar space. Such an image has never before been seen!
The Pegasus XL rocket was released from a Lockheed L-1011 aircraft after taking off from Kwajalein Atoll air base, which is located in the South Pacific Ocean.
The rocket was then dropped at 17:47:23 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 1:47:23 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), from its launch base at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
The IBEX spacecraft separated from the third stage of the rocket six minutes later at 1:53 p.m. EDT.
Over the following 45 days, the IBEX will be raised to a 4,400 mile by 200,000 mile (7,100 kilometer by 322,000 kilometer) orbit about the Earth.
The series of maneuvers is considered a low-cost way to launch such large spacecraft into orbit.
The launch via an aircraft rather than with a ground-based rocket also helps to insert more massive payloads into orbit about the Earth.
The NASA webpage for IBEX found at “
IBEX: The Interstellar Boundary Explorer.”
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