A NASA spacecraft is all set to be launched on Sunday with the aim to study the outermost reaches of the solar system with minutest of details.

On Sunday, this spacecraft dubbed as the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, satellite will be launched from a site at the Kwajalein Atoll in the south Pacific. Following the launch it will function for two years in high-Earth Orbit.

A huge protective bubble around the solar system called the heliosphere is formed by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles from the Sun. a shock at the edge of this bubble is formed where the in the interstellar space, the solar winds collides with the gas and the dust.

The motive behind designing IBEX is to detect atoms that are heated and thrown off from this boundary, which screens the solar system from hazardous charged particles called cosmic rays that come from elsewhere in the Milky Way. 

At a press briefing on Friday Nathan Schwadron, IBEX's head of science operations said, “These boundaries really protect us from the fairly harsh galactic environment.”

Team member Herb Funsten of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a statement, “Every six months, we will make global sky maps of where these atoms come from and how fast they are traveling. From this information, we will be able to discover what the edge of our bubble looks like and learn about the properties of the interstellar cloud that lies beyond the bubble.”