NASA has launched a two-year mission to study the boundary of the heliosphere, a huge protective bubble in space created by the Sun. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) took off today aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The mission is now on a four-month journey to Lagrange point 1 (L1) – a point in space about 1.6 million kilometres from the Earth towards the Sun.
The solar wind is a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun into space that helps to form the heliosphere. IMAP will study the solar wind and its interaction with the interstellar medium to better understand the heliosphere and its boundaries, which begin about 14 billion kilometres from Earth. This boundary offers protection from harsh radiation from space and is key to creating and maintaining a habitable solar system.
IMAP, which is 2.4 m in diameter and almost 1 m high, will also support real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic particles that can harm satellites as well as disrupt global communications and electrical grids on Earth. From L1, IMAP will provide a 30-minute warning to astronauts and spacecraft near Earth of harmful radiation.
To do so, IMAP contains 10 instruments that capture data on energetic neutral atoms, the solar wind and interstellar dust.
They include a high-energy ion telescope, an electron instrument as well as a magnetometer that has been developed by Imperial College London. It will measure the strength and direction of magnetic fields in space, providing crucial data to improve our understanding of space weather.
“Our magnetic field instrument will help us understand how particles are accelerated at shock waves and travel through the solar system,” notes Imperial’s Timothy Horbury. “I’m especially excited that our data will be made public within minutes of being measured over a million miles away, supporting real-time space weather forecasts. It’s a great example of how scientific measurements can positively impact society.”
The IMAP mission is led by Princeton University and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory with contributions from 25 institutions across six countries.
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