I missed this mission

 

Just found out about an interesting NASA mission that's in orbit now, and I completely missed when it launched.

It's called IXPE, the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer.  It launched in December 2021, when COVID-19 was in full rage.  NASA deserves some credit for getting it launched when everybody was worried about getting infected.

So it began science operations in January 2022.

I found out about IXPE because I came across this recent article.

NASA finds new information from star that exploded more than 450 years ago

"The process by which a supernova remnant becomes a giant particle accelerator involves a delicate dance between order and chaos," Patrick Slane, senior astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a statement. "Strong and turbulent magnetic fields are required, but IXPE is showing us that there is a large-scale uniformity, or coherence, involved as well, extending right down to the sites where the acceleration is taking place."

Here's what IXPE looks like: