Diamond like carbon films that were developed at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., are being used on NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer to help determine how solar wind interacts with the matter that exists between stars.
IBEX, which was launched last October, has on-board sensors that are designed to find “particles bouncing back toward Earth from the distant frontier between the hot solar wind from the sun and the cold wall of interstellar space,” a spokesman says.
The NASA probe — assuming all goes well — will produce a three-dimensional map of the boundary that demarcates where solar wind collides with the interstellar material.