Orbital IBEX - Manual

Heliophysics
IBEX's orbit takes it up to 200,000 miles
from Earth.
Six months into its mission, IBEX
surveyed the entire sky to reveal the
structure of the edges of our solar
system.
Mission:
NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) Program
Customer:
Southwest Research Institute –
San Antonio, Texas
FACTS AT A GLANCE
IBEX in Orbital's Dulles, Virginia satellite
manufacturing facility
IBEX
Interstellar Boundary Explorer
LEO
Mission Description
As part of a Southwest Research Institute team led by Principal Investigator Dr. David McComas,
Orbital was selected in January 2005 to develop, build and launch a small spacecraft for NASA’s
Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission. The spacecraft is based on Orbital’s LEOStar-1™
spacecraft product line.
The IBEX satellite orbits the Earth every eight days on a highly-elliptical path that takes it to an apogee
of 320,000 kilometers (approximately 80 percent of the distance to the Moon) to make the first
comprehensive map of the boundary between our Solar System and interstellar space. Measuring
this interstellar interaction is important for understanding our protection from galactic cosmic rays –
energetic particles from beyond the Solar System – that could pose health risks to future astronauts
exploring deep space.
IBEX was launched on October 19, 2008, aboard Orbital's Pegasus ® launch vehicle from the
Kwajalein Atoll launch site in the central Pacific Ocean. The spacecraft incorporated an on-board
solid rocket motor and hydrazine propulsion system to propel it to the final high-altitude orbit beyond
Earth’s magnetosphere, as required by IBEX’s scientific instrument.
Spacecraft
The IBEX spacecraft is based on Orbital’s highly reliable LEOStar-1 spacecraft platform, subsystems
and supporting software, which has a proven track record of success on a total of 45 missions.
The payload consists of two narrow angle image sensors (IBEX-Hi and IBEX-Lo) and a Combined
Electronics Unit (CEU).