The U.S. space agency launches today a space probe that will keep an eye on the violence and turbulence at the very edge of the solar system.

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is due to begin its mission at Kwajalein Atoll, the largest coral atoll on the planet, where it will be launched aboard a Pegasus rocket that will be dropped from a jet.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, IBEX will orbit high above the Earth to photograph the interstellar boundaries that separate our heliosphere from the local interstellar medium of our Galaxy. The region is an enormous stretch of turbulent gas and twisting magnetic fields. This mission of taking pictures and recording those baffling boundaries will last two years.

The Spaceship’s two sensors will gather data about the solar wind's mass and energy from all directions, and capture high-speed atoms traveling toward Earth (7830 miles in diameter) from beyond the orbit of Pluto, the solar system’s most remote planet.

By analyzing the images provided by NASA’s explorer, scientists will be able to map the frontier between the solar system, located billions of kilometers from Earth, and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. This way, experts will finally get to the bottom of the secrets of “this important interaction between the sun and the galaxy," said David McComas, senior executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

"The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," he added.

The only data scientists have regarding this remote region from the universe is offered by the twin spacecrafts Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in the summer of 1977 and currently still in service.

The Voyager 1 space probe is the first man-made object that left our star system and the farthest one from Earth. It is currently about 16 billion km from the Sun and has penetrated the heliosheath, the region of the heliosphere beyond the termination shock, where wind is compressed. Voyager 2, which visited four planets and their moons, found that the 'bubble' formed around the Solar System by supersonic solar wind is irregular and dynamic.

Ibex may confirm that the sun's heliosphere or the protective bubble surrounding the solar system, is shrinking and weakening.

Last month, data from the joint National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European Space Agency Ulysses solar mission revealed that the solar wind is at a 50-year low, potentially opening up the solar system to more dangerous rays from outer space.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer “is really a mission of discovery," stated Nathan Schwadron, an associate professor of astronomy at Boston University and co-investigator for the flight. "And what that means for us is we really have never seen the structures that surround and protect the entire solar system."

Researchers were not surprised that the solar wind has decreased. In fact, the amount of radiation sent off by the sun operates in an 11-year cycle, but this dip was lower than those recently observed. Still, it may be in line with centuries-long patterns, said Nancy Crooker, a research professor at Boston University.

"This is not a good time to be travelling in space," Crooker said, but noted that astronauts travelling to the International Space Station are in no additional danger because the ISS is close enough to Earth to be protected by its magnetic shield.

IBEX weighs 462 kilos and measures 52 centimeters (23 inches) high and 97 centimeters (38 inches) across. It is shaped like an octagon and has been equipped with two big aperture single pixel cameras designed to measure energetic neural atoms. The two-year mission is worth $169 million, NASA said.

IBEX was launched aboard a Pegasus rocket, NASA's smallest orbital vehicle, which was dropped from under the wing of an L-1011 aircraft flying over the Pacific Ocean. The rocket would carry Ibex to an orbit about 200,000 miles above Earth.