The IBEX spacecraft is still waiting safely in our clean room, where it has been since April 18th. In that time, we have been rapidly developing two parallel paths to soften the Launch Vehicle (LV) ride and make it possible to survive the higher LV forces that we were told about in March. The first of those - the C-ring (see the May update) - didn't pan out on its first iteration as we had hoped. In the meantime, our other path, something called a "shock ring," has moved to the front as our leading solution. Shock rings use a bolted-together stack of steel rings and shims to reduce the magnitude of the LV loads. The picture shows our 38"-diameter shock ring in the middle of final assembly.

This month I'm really delighted to introduce Emily Fowler, who is a Project Engineer at CSA Engineering in Mountain View, California. Emily is the Lead for the IBEX Shock Ring development. I hadn't met Emily until May, but have been incredibly impressed by how quickly and well she and her whole team at CSA have picked up the LV loads problem and moved to design and produce a shock ring specifically to fix it. Delivery is just a couple days away and we are all appreciative of their very hard work for us!

At the moment we don't have an official launch date, but everyone is working toward an October 5 launch; hopefully that will become the official plan very soon!

Oh yeah, one last thing, you can catch a short IBEX video that the Goddard folks made on YouTube (if you don't know what that is, ask your kids). Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK84m2FgDbU".

Project Engineer Emily Fowler and her team at CSA Engineering, a Moog Company, are a little like superheroes for spacecraft. When testing reveals that a rocket's vibrations might damage a spacecraft on its ride into space, they swoop in to save the day by creating custom vibration isolation systems to make the launch less bumpy.

Right now the team is working on "rescuing" the IBEX spacecraft from potentially harmful shaking by crafting a device called a SoftRide ShockRing to cushion and keep it separate from the rocket. Emily is the lead engineer for the design of IBEX's ShockRing. "A ShockRing is a whole spacecraft isolation system," Emily said. "We're going to help protect the satellite during launch."

Emily and her team have been working nights and weekends to complete the design, construction, and testing of the ShockRing in an accelerated eight week schedule. The process normally takes up to four months.

"We're glad to be part of the IBEX mission," Emily said. "We are excited about this design, and really think it's going to serve IBEX well. It is not just my work, but the work of many dedicated engineers who have gone above and beyond what would usually be a four-month program and squished it down to eight weeks. It's taken a lot of dedication. I appreciate the confidence that members of the IBEX team have put into CSA to be of service to the mission."

Watching the ShockRing successfully protect the spacecraft during launch is the most satisfying element of Emily's work. "Seeing things launch, and knowing that we did our job, and that we're sending something up there in space with a nice smooth ride, and watching it go is the best part of my job," Emily said. "Being there from when we get a problem and we take [the solution] from an idea to fruition, and seeing it installed and launching is great."

Emily loves that projects she designs end up outside Earth's atmosphere. "I get to help launch stuff into space - that's just cool! When you [work on a project] from start to finish, you get to do and see a lot and learn a lot," she said.