NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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Dr. Nathan Schwadron, IBEX Science Operations Lead, Boston University: We have through the exploration over the last fifty years of the Solar System, we have come to understand the planets that surround us, we have come to understand much of the things about our Solar System but we are missing a fundamental part. We don’t know what the boundaries of our Solar System are that surround our entire Solar System and separate us from the galactic environment.

Those boundaries protect us and explorers leaving Earth and going into space from the harsh galactic radiation from beyond these boundaries.

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Dave McComas, IBEX Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute: I am Dave McComas, the principal investigator for IBEX, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer.

IBEX, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, is a new NASA mission, to discover the interaction between our Solar System and the galaxy.

As principal investigator for the IBEX mission I am responsible for everything, from the conception of the mission all the way to the final science.

The solar wind flowing out from the sun inflates this bubble that we call the heliosphere. If it weren’t for that bubble, very dangerous galactic cosmic rays would be coming into the inner Solar System and could in fact affect life on Earth.

IBEX’s job is to study those boundaries and understand how they really work and tell us how this very important region is able to do this very important job of protecting us so well.

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