iBex – Destined to look ahead for Voyager.
The Voyager spacecraft have far exceeded their original goals of studying the outer planets and gone on to feedback some important data about the region called the “Termination Shock”. This is where the Solar wind slows considerably from around 1 million miles per hour to a quarter of a million miles per hour. It is the start of the outer boundary where the Suns influence start to give way to Inter stellar space.
Now, the ibex probe has been launched to investigate some of the phenomena discovered by the Voyager spacecraft and go on to investigate what the Voyager spacecraft can expect to encounter when they reach the Heliopause. This is the point at which the influence of the Sun is perfectly balanced with the influence of the Inter stellar medium.
The launch of ibex was unusual. Rather than being launched at ground level, it was dropped from a jet and then propelled into Earth orbit aboard a Pegasus rocket.