[3] The mission is led by Dr. David J. McComas (IBEX principal investigator), formerly of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and now with Princeton University.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center built the IBEX-Hi and IBEX-Lo sensors respectively.

The Orbital Sciences Corporation manufactured the satellite bus and was the location for spacecraft environmental testing.

[8] IBEX has achieved this goal by generating full sky maps of the intensity (integrated over the line-of-sight) of ENAs in a range of energies every six months.

The IBEX satellite was mated to its Pegasus XL launch vehicle at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and the combined vehicle was then suspended below the Lockheed L-1011 Stargazer mother airplane and flown to Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean.

[10] The IBEX satellite initially launched into a highly elliptical transfer orbit with a low perigee and used a solid fuel rocket motor as its final boost stage at apogee in order to raise its perigee greatly and to achieve its desired high-altitude elliptical orbit.

Its original orbit was about 7,000 × 320,000 km (4,300 × 198,800 mi)[5] — that is, about 80% of the distance to the Moon — which has changed primarily due to an intentional adjustment to prolong the spacecraft's useful life.

This extreme altitude is critical due to the amount of charged-particle interference that would occur while taking measurements within the magnetosphere.

[6] The heliospheric boundary of the Solar System is being imaged by measuring the location and magnitude of charge-exchange collisions occurring in all directions.

The scientific payload also includes a Combined Electronics Unit (CEU) that controls the voltages on the collimator and the ESA, and it reads and records data from the particle detectors of each sensor.

[12] Compared to other space observatories, IBEX has a low data transfer rate due to the limited requirements of the mission.

Once the signal is collected by the receivers on Earth, it is carried over the internet to Mission control center in Dulles, Virginia, and to the IBEX Science Operation Center in San Antonio, Texas".IBEX is collecting energetic neutral atom (ENA) emissions that are traveling through the Solar System to Earth and cannot be measured by conventional telescopes.

[18] The Sun is currently traveling through the Local Interstellar Cloud, and the heliosphere's size and shape are key factors in determining its shielding power from cosmic rays.