NASA Essay

Samantha Elliott
Comp 106
25 November 2008
The Solar System’s Frontier
On October 19, 2008, NASA launched a spacecraft into space. This spacecraft was unlike any other that NASA has launched before. This spacecraft did not have any astronauts on board; it was on a mission. The spacecraft was the start of a project to help study the outer edges of the solar system.
The spacecraft, called Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched from a rocket above an island in the Pacific. If everything goes smoothly, then the IBEX will become the first spacecraft to complete a feat like this. To do something in "a place where solar wind smashes into the gases from outside the solar system."
The region that the spacecraft is heading toward is where the most dangerous cosmic rays lay. "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. According to ABC’s website, solar wind is "a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at one million miles per hour," and "carves out a protective bubble around the solar system. This bubble, known as the heliosphere, shields against the most dangerous cosmic radiation that would otherwise interfere with human spaceflight."
The solar win, for reasons unknown to scientists is at the weakest wind pressure it has experienced in over 50 years. Hope is that the space probe will be able to tell us why. Scientists suspect that the heliosphere could be shrinking.
The spacecraft will send back astonishing photos unlike anything that we have ever seen. We cannot travel that far ourselves, so we have to rely on the spacecraft to do it for us. "The Solar System’s Frontier is billions of miles away, so it’s difficult for us to go there, but interesting things happen at boundaries, and with IBEX, we will see them for the first time," said Robert MacDowall, an IBEX Mission Scientist. McComas added that, "IBEX will let us visualize our home in the galaxy for the first time and explore how it may have evolved over this history of the solar system."
I am so excited for this mission to continue. We all should be. The pictures that this spacecraft comes back with are going to change science, as we know it. It will come back with pictures we never could have imagined and help us to understand the solar system as a whole and figure out exactly where we fit. We should all be happy and excited to be a part of this.

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Tigervision Media. October 20, 2008.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39808/133
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Turner Broadcasting System Inc. 2008.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/10/20/solarprobe/