CHIPS

Exploring the world around us has always been a big part of people's lives. While the early American settlers boarded ships that would bring them to the New World, in the 1800s, the Wild West became the next big place to explore as covered wagons carried people across the rough and unknown area.

 

Today, Space exploration is the new frontier. Every year, NASA and organizations from other countries launch missions to explore and collect information about the various planets, stars and other bodies that make up the night sky.

Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) made history when it was launched in January 2003. The satellite launch was the first university-class mission funded by NASA. The project was a joint effort between NASA, SpaceDev and the University of California, Berkeley.

 

CHIPS was a satellite about the size of a big suitcase that weighed over 100 pounds. The mission CHIPS was designed to carry out was unique in that it wasn't going to study a planet or star system. Instead, CHIPS was designed to study what's hiding between these bodies.

Space isn't just made up of the stars and other bodies we can see with our own eyes and telescopes. It is also made up of various gases and dust, called the Interstellar Medium (ISM). These gases are the building blocks that make planets and other objects in space possible.

 

For over a year, the CHIPS satellite captured images of these gases and dust. It then separated the images so that scientists could study them and hopefully get some insight into how the different objects are formed.

According to NASA, finding out exactly how these gases and dust combine to form the stars, planets and other celestial bodies in our night sky is one of the big mysteries. While many scientists have proposed theories towards this end, the data CHIPS has gathered is crucial to putting it all together and confirming or refuting the theories once and for all.

 

CHIPS has studied an area 300 light years across from the sun that called the Local Bubble, which scientists believe was formed by a Supernova explosion. Aerospace researchers figure that the explosion caused the gases and dust to move away from where the explosion actually happened.

On Jan. 12, 2003, the CHIPS satellite was launched from a Boeing Delta II rocket into space. Along with helping to answer questions about our universe, the $18 million CHIPS mission also hoped to help budding scientists at UC Berkeley gain experience working on an actual mission with real data.

With the data CHIPS collected, scientists hope to gain a greater understanding about the cooling process of galactic gases, the structure and distribution of these gases and the potential for this new information to improve future studies.

 

 

CHIPS (2008). Home Page. Retrieved February 15, 2008, from the CHIPS Web site.
 
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NASA (2008). Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer Satellite (CHIPS) Mission. Retrieved February 7, 2008, from the NASA Web site:.
 
NASA (2008). NASA's Ready to Study Cool Ice, Hot Plasma and Ocean Winds. Retrieved February 7, 2008, from the NASA Web site.
 
Space Daily (n.d.). Satellite to Study the Space in Space Nears Launch. Retrieved February 7, 2008, from the Space Daily Web site.