SpaceX<\/b> launched a NASA<\/b> mission early Thursday that will measure supernova remnants and supermassive black holes in the universe. <\/p>\n
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA\u2019s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1 a.m. EST on Dec. 9. Spacecraft separation took place 33 minutes into flight. IXPE entered its orbit around Earth\u2019s equator at an altitude of approximately 600 km. Mission operators received telemetry data about 40 minutes after launch. <\/p>\n
The IXPE observatory is a joint effort with the Italian Space Agency<\/b>. It is equipped with three telescopes to measure the polarization of X-rays from high-energy objects, which NASA calls the most \u201cextreme and mysterious objects in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama built the three X-ray telescopes. The Italian Space Agency contributed IXPE\u2019s polarization detectors, and Ball Aerospace<\/b> provided the spacecraft, integration, and will manage spacecraft operations. The spacecraft is part of the NASA Astrophysics Explorers Program.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach NASA spacecraft is carefully chosen to target brand new observations enabling new science, and IXPE is going to show us the violent universe around us \u2013 such as exploding stars and the black holes at the center of galaxies \u2013 in ways we\u2019ve never been able to see it,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SpaceX launched a NASA mission early Thursday that will measure supernova remnants and supermassive black holes in the universe. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA\u2019s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1 a.m. EST on Dec. 9. Spacecraft separation took place 33 minutes into flight. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}