Posted: Tue, Oct 21, 2008, 7:02 AM ET (1102 GMT)
A Pegasus rocket successfully Sunday launched a NASA mission designed to study the solar system's distant boundary. The Pegasus XL rocket deployed from its L-1011 carrier aircraft near Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean at 1:47 pm EDT (1747 GMT) Sunday and placed the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft into a temporary parking orbit about eight minutes later. The spacecraft's kick stage then fired to put the spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of about 320,000 kilometers, about 80 percent the distance of the moon. IBEX, a NASA Small Explorer class mission, is designed to study the heliosphere, the region of space dominated by the solar wind, and its boundary with the interstellar medium.

Related Links:

•  Spaceflight Now article
•  NASASpaceFlight.com article
•  Aerospace Daily article
•  Physics World article
•  NASA press release