Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX)

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery. IBEX is currently producing the first global images of the heliosphere’s interaction with the local interstellar medium—these images provide an entirely new framework for understanding the relationship between our heliosphere and the galactic environment. This book comprises a set of papers that describe the IBEX science, instruments, and mission and put these in the context of the existing knowledge of the interstellar interaction at the time of the launch. The book sets the stage for research that will be based on data from the IBEX mission. We sincerely hope that future researchers, authors and students will use this information to help in their studies.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is a small explorer mission with the sole, focused science objective to discover the global interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium. IBEX is designed to achieve this objective by answering four fundamental science questions:

What is the global strength and structure of the termination shock?

How are energetic protons accelerated at the termination shock?

What are the global properties of the solar wind flow beyond the termination shock and in the heliotail?, and

How does the interstellar flow interact with the heliosphere beyond the heliopause?

The answers to these questions rely on IBEX’s energy resolved images of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), which originate beyond the termination shock, in the inner heliosheath.