Surveying the Heliosphere (broadcast Friday, October 16th, 2009)

A 'ribbon' seen in a map of energetic neutral atom fluxes by the IBEX spacecraft. Photo courtesy Southwest Research Institute.

A series of journal articles published this week draw a new picture of our solar system's heliosphere, the bubble carved out in the interstellar medium by the solar wind. The six papers draw on data from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, coupled with data from the Cassini mission, to map out an overall sky map of the heliosphere. Detectors on the IBEX craft focus on the movement of energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs, to create the map. We'll talk with David J. McComas, principal investigator on the IBEX mission, about the work.