NASA’s Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) satellite, scheduled for launch on Jan. 11, will study the gases and dust in space, which are believed to be the basic building blocks of stars and planets.
CHIPS will launch aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket at approximately 7:45 p.m. EST from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. It is as a secondary payload to NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat).
The material between the stars is known as the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and contains important clues about the formation and evolution of galaxies. The ISM literally contains the seeds of future stars.
When the gas in the ISM cools and collapses, clumps are formed that can evolve into stars and planets. One of the biggest puzzles in astrophysics is the process that turns this diffuse mix of dust, hot and cold gases into stars.
Our solar system is located in a region of space called the “Local Bubble,” which is about 300 light years in diameter. The Bubble is filled with extremely low-density gas that is much less dense than the average interstellar medium surrounding it. This gas is extremely hot, about one million Kelvin (1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit), or about 180 times as hot as the surface of our Sun. The CHIPS mission is studying this extremely diffuse gas inside the Local Bubble.
“CHIPS will give us invaluable information into the origin, physical processes and properties of the hot gas in the nearby interstellar medium,” said Dr. Mark Hurwitz, CHIPS principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley.
The CHIPS satellite, the first NASA University-Class Explorer (UNEX) mission, weighs 131 pounds (60 kilograms) and is the size of a large suitcase. It will orbit the Earth at about 350 miles (590 kilometers) altitude and is expected to operate for one year.
“As a UNEX mission, CHIPS was developed primarily as a training device, but which can obtain actual and valuable science data,” said Dave Pierce, NASA CHIPS mission manager from the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va. “The primary objective of the UNEX Program is to provide the opportunity for training of young scientists and engineers on a real flight mission. In this regard CHIPS has been very successful helping to train about 15 young engineers, ” he said.
The CHIPS mission costs about $18 million, which includes flight hardware, integration and launch vehicle, data analysis, and mission operations.
The Office of Space Science, NASA Headquarters, Washington, sponsors the project. The project is managed at the Wallops Flight Facility and the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., through the NASA Explorers Program. The CHIPS instrument was built at the Space Science Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and the spacecraft bus was built by SpaceDev, Inc. of Poway, Calif.
For detailed information about CHIPS and its mission, go to:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2002/1217chips.html
http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/intro.html