On Wednesday afternoon, March 4, in downtown Chicago on the lakefront, Adler Planetarium hosted a small party and showing of their newest planetarium program, “IBEX: Search for the Edge of the Solar System.” IBEX is short for Interstellar Boundary Explorer, a NASA spacecraft that was launched four months ago and is partway through its mission of mapping the region of the outer solar system in unprecedented detail.
The show premieres today at the Adler, and is very entertaining if I may say so myself — I wrote the show. It was great fun working with Mark Paternostro, the show’s producer and Adler’s Art Director, and Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute, the originator of IBEX and its project scientist. “Four months since launch, and we’re getting fantastic science results,” said McComas. “The data so far are really fascinating with clear spatial variations in both the fluxes and energies of the neutral atoms traveling in from the edge of the solar system. We’ll have much to tell later this summer following the completion of the first all-sky map.”
I encourage anyone who can make it to Chicago to check out the show, which will give you lots to think about on how our understanding of the outermost regions of the solar system is about to change dramatically.
Above: Editor Dave Eicher’s wife Lynda checks out the Chicago skyline.
Above: Adler’s Art Director, Mark Paternostro (left), produced the IBEX show. Standing beside him is the IBEX project scientist, Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute, the astronomer who thought up the IBEX mission.