Time.news – It started successfully the Ixpe mission of NASA and the Italian Space Agency for the study of extreme phenomena in the Universe. The satellite was launched at 7 am Italian time from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, with the help of the carrier Falcon 9 of the private company SpaceX.
The tools aboard the Ixpe mission allow you to observe violent and still mysterious phenomena in the Universe, such as supernova explosions or supermassive black holes, with an efficiency one hundred times greater than that of X-ray telescopes of 50 years ago.
#IXPE , the new frontier of X-ray astronomy,
watch the in-depth analysis with the interviews with the Italian mission team
NASA
https://t.co/8HMTMNxDiA pic.twitter.com/SxRABFtJYU– ITA Space Agency (@ASI_spazio) December 9, 2021
The three telescopes, all designed and built in Italy, will allow us to understand how the X-rays emitted by very distant and still almost unknown cosmic objects are polarized, that is, how they vibrate in a particular direction, and this will help to better understand the extreme environments in which they are generated.
Italy participates with 20 million euros and its scientific and technological expertise: the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) has the scientific coordination, while the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn), with INAF and the support of ASI, has conceived and developed the instrument that constitutes the heart of the mission, the Global Pixel Detector (Gpd). The University of Roma Tre also collaborates in the scientific part.
The ASI also makes available to the Ixpe mission both its Malindi base for data reception, thanks to the collaboration of Telespazio (Leonardo-Thales), and the Space Science Data Center (Ssdc) for data analysis. For the industry, the Ohb-Italia company also collaborates in the mission.
Deployment of IXPE confirmed pic.twitter.com/Gqx52tUf2O
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 9, 2021
La missione Ixpe (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), announced in January 2017, was developed as part of the NASA’s Malla Explorer (Smex) program, and has a total cost of 180 million.
The launch was attended by the president of ASI, Giorgio Saccoccia and the administrator of NASA, Bill Nelson.
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