A team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder is gathering at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning for a planned launch of their IDEX space device.
The IDEX, short for Interstellar Dust Experiment, was built to collect stardust, which is composed of rare particles that continuously enter our solar system from the greater Milky Way Galaxy — often travelling in one direction, like a current.
“You are made out of stardust. We are all made out of stardust,” Mihály Horányi, the project’s principal investigator, told CPR News. “So, it's kind of a curious thing. What exactly are we made out of? How does that compare to the solar system dust as it is today? Colleagues of mine argue that this is the closest you will ever get to the original building blocks or our solar system four and a half billion years ago.”
Stardust — also called interstellar dust — is created by massive stars that die and explode, turning into supernovas and scattering particles that travel like a giant river through our galaxy. The IDEX team hopes to learn more about the composition and mass of the interstellar dust in order to decipher the chemicals and other materials that make up the building blocks of our solar system — and hopefully take another step closer towards discovering the origins of our solar system.
“Interstellar dust is special compared to the interplanetary dust because it does not have as many collisions or what we call processing, which includes heating from the sun or contact with water, ice, etc.,” Ethan Ayari, a graduate research assistant on the IDEX team, said. “That’s what makes stardust different from other particles in space. It's the same way that it was billions of years ago.”
IDEX is one of 10 devices launching into space aboard NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. The probe will launch into space from Florida on a SpaceX rocket early Wednesday morning. IMAP will then travel 932,000 miles to settle at a location about 1% of the way from Earth to the Sun called Lagrange Point 1. The full trip will take around 4 months, but IDEX will start collecting dust a few weeks into the mission.
The device is shaped like a large drum. While in space, it will take in particles of stardust, which will instantly vaporize into ions, electrons, and other elements when they hit a target at the back of the device. IDEX will analyze the ions from the particles to find out what materials they are composed of, like minerals or even organic molecules. It’s also capable of taking in larger particles that break off from comets and asteroids.
“We get — as a data product from the instrument — what we call a dust hit or dust impact, and then we'll know the mass of that particle,” Scott Knappmiller, the lead instrument engineer on IDEX, said. “We measure that, and then we get to know what its composition is in terms of how many hydrogen atoms or helium, carbon, iron. We get to know its chemical composition broken down [and] what it's made out of chemically and with how much abundance.”
CU Boulder said IDEX is the biggest device of its kind ever built and will be entering “uncharted territory.” Scientists estimate the instrument will collect around 100 grains of interstellar dust a year during the first two years of the IMAP mission. As of now, scientists have only collected and identified 43 particles of stardust.
IDEX has involved around 100 people, and the instrument will carry the names of the 87 main contributors on an engraved plaque into space. The team operates within CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Of those, around 30 people are in Florida today to witness the launch.
“I know it's a hunk of metal wires and chips, but it's still very emotional. A lot of people put in a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of commitment to make it work,” Horányi said. “It is emotional, exciting. It's kind of weird: half of these adult people, engineers, scientists, are going to cry.”
“I will cry.”
The launch is scheduled for 5:30 a.m. MT.
