Meet the IBEX Mission
We get a lot of science news announcements across our desks at Loch Ness Productions. Every day there’s a discovery or a new result in astronomy that expands humanity’s collective knowledge of the cosmos just a bit more. These are perfect fodder for fulldome shows.
A couple of weeks ago we received a press release announcing that NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission successfully mapped the boundaries of the Sun’s heliosphere—the region of space that is surrounded in a “bubble” of charged particles flowing out through the solar wind. The heliosphere encompasses the entire solar system, and its limit (that is, where it contacts interstellar space) is called the heliopause. It turns out, based on the IBEX studies, that the heliosphere is shaped more like a comet tail than a circular bubble.
Interestingly enough, astronomers have long spotted such tails around other stars, but finding our own star’s tail has been more difficult. IBEX mapped the extent of it by measuring neutral particles that are created by collisions between the solar wind and interstellar gas at the heliosphere’s boundaries.
As part of the IBEX mission’s outreach, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago produced a fulldome show called IBEX: Search for the Edge of the Solar System. It really gives a nice introduction to the mission and helps audiences understand the spacecraft’s accomplishments. The show does this by including IBEX scientists and engineers in the presentation, and explains the mission from start to finish, through the eyes of a pair of inquisitive teenagers.
We personally like the show because it carefully explains a topic that can be difficult to visualize: the effects and extent of the Sun’s influence. It was produced not long after we finished work on a series of online videos about space weather and the effects of the Sun called Space Weather FX for MIT’s Haystack Observatory. From that experience we knew how complex it is to tell the story of the Sun’s influence.
IBEX: Search for the Edge of the Solar System utilizes a number of science visualizations to teach about this remarkable spacecraft and its mission. The show was created specifically for fulldome and the producers did a great job of utilizing the immersive space to tell the spacecraft’s remarkable story. As IBEX continues to explore the extent of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, there will likely be more discoveries announced. Theaters with the IBEX show in repertory will have a decided advantage as they use the show to help explain this marvelous spacecraft’s ongoing mission and accomplishments.
We’re pleased to be distributing this show in partnership with Adler. It emphasizes a number of STEM topics, including astronomy and an exploration of the states of matter, to help audiences understand what IBEX is detecting.
And for those working with tight budgets, we should point out the IBEX show has no license fee. We charge a nominal fee for encoding the movies into the various formats required by fulldome systems.
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