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UNH Scientists Get $5M to Work With NASA

Posted on: Friday, 4 February 2005, 12:00 CST

DURHAM, N.H. - Two University of New Hampshire space scientists have been awarded $5 million to help NASA build instruments for missions beyond the solar system.

Eberhard Mobius and Marty Lee of the UNH Space Science Center will work with NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, mission along with engineers, scientists and UNH students to build critical parts of special cameras for the IBEX spacecraft, the university said.

UNH will contribute the optics for the two cameras and the sensor system for one of the cameras.

IBEX is a new mission in NASA's Small Explorer Program. The mission is being led by Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and has a total price tag of $134 million.

IBEX will probe the boundary between Earth's solar system and the rest of Earth's galaxy.

The "space" between the stars has not been well investigated, Mobius said, largely because of a lack of instrumentation to do the job.

"This mission really tackles a new measurement that we could not do before," says Mobius who, like Lee, is a professor of space plasma physics.

To build the instruments, Mobius said, "we are using a known technique but we are pushing it to its limits."

To get the distance of the region imaged by IBEX, the mission will include the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which since 1977 has been heading out of Earth's solar system. When Voyager 1 punches through the region separating Earth's solar system from interstellar space, IBEX cameras will pinpoint the point of exit. Mobius said.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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