| Abstrakt: |
This paper briefly highlights two exciting new space missions—the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and Solar Probe. Between these two, mankind will be able to understand the critical physical processes at the outermost and innermost boundaries of our heliosphere for the first time. IBEX will launch in the summer of 2008 to make energy-resolved images of energetic neutral atoms emanating from the inner heliosheath, beyond the termination shock, and enable detailed analysis of the global interaction of the heliosphere with the local interstellar medium. At the inner boundary, Solar Probe has been proposed to fly within 3 solar radii of the Sun’s surface, to provide the first in situ, observations down in the solar corona. While very different missions, IBEX and Solar Probe each enable revolutionary scientific discovery at one of the two remaining unexplored boundaries of our heliosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
