NASA’s latest mission will reveal the secrets of black holes and neutron stars

The satellite is scheduled to launch at around 01:00 ET Thursday morning aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Live coverage of the launch will be available on NASA TV and Agency website.–

The spacecraft, a collaborative effort between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, carried three telescopes. While IXPE is not as large as NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, it is the first space observatory of its kind. Satellites will be able to see an often overlooked aspect of cosmic ray sources called polarization.

“The launch of IXPE is a unique and bold step forward for X-ray astronomy,” said Martin Weiskopf, principal investigator at IXPE, in a statement. “IXPE will tell us more about the exact nature of cosmic X-ray sources than we can learn by studying their brightness and color spectrum alone.”

X-rays are wavelengths of high-energy light that result from extremes. In space, these include strong magnetic fields, collisions between objects, explosions, searing temperatures, and fast spins. This light is practically encoded by the sign of what it creates, but Earth’s atmosphere prevents X-rays from reaching Earth. This is why scientists rely on X-ray telescopes in space.

Polarized light is also unique in its source and what it passes through along the way. While light waves can vibrate in any direction, polarized light only vibrates in one direction.

Understanding Extreme Cosmic Objects

Using IXPE to study the polarization of cosmic X-rays could help scientists better understand supernova remnants, such as black holes and neutron stars, their surroundings, and how they produce X-rays. This view of extreme cosmic objects could also reveal answers to bigger fundamental questions about physics.