What came prior to IBEX?
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Voyager spacecraft expanded our knowledge of the outer Solar System. Voyager 1 and 2 both explored the planets Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 went on to take advantage of a good arrangement of orbits to explore Uranus and Neptune, the only spacecraft to ever have done so. After their planetary observations, both spacecraft continued outward in different directions. The Voyagers were only supposed to last a few years, but they have continued to operate for over 30 years, well past their designed lifetime. Both Voyagers are located around 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is the distance of the region which IBEX maps. The Voyagers have been able to directly measure the area where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. This data will be combined with IBEX’s data, allowing scientists to create a more complete model of the boundary of our solar system.
