NASA to launch IMAP mission to protect Earth from devastating solar storms

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — With SpaceX’s help, NASA and NOAA will launch three spacecraft early Wednesday morning that will study the solar system’s “bubble,” collect information on solar storms that could impact Earth and study the planet’s upper atmosphere.

And the senior research scientist of one of these missions explains why it is so important. 

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set to send up — really up — the IMAP mission from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, stated the California-based company.

The instantaneous launch is scheduled for 7:30 a.m. ET.

The 45th Weather Squadron is calling for an 85% chance of good liftoff conditions, with the only concerns being the cumulus cloud rule.

It was originally set to go up on Tuesday at 7:32 a.m. ET, but more time was needed for SpaceX’s droneship to reach its destination, stated NASA.

If the launch is scrubbed, a backup date has not been announced yet.  

Second time up

This is the second mission for this Falcon 9’s first-stage booster rocket, B1096.

Its maiden voyage was in July of this year when it launched Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites.  

After the stage separation, the newbie B1096 is expected to land on the droneship Just Read the Instructions, which will be located in the Atlantic Ocean.

About the mission

As mentioned before, three spacecraft will be sent up really high. They will go to the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange Point, between the planet and our resident star. Just a mere million miles from Earth.

The first of these crafts is NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), which will study the heliosphere, described as a bubble (not an actual one) that surrounds our solar system.

The heliosphere is believed to be created by the sun’s wind and it encapsulates the solar system. It protects Earth and the other planets from cosmic rays and particles from deep space.

IMAP has 10 instruments that will create a picture of the sun’s high-energy particles, the magnetic fields in interplanetary space, and possibly the remnants of explored stars from interstellar space.

Those instruments are:

1. Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX)
2. IMAP Magnetometer (MAG)
3. IMAP-Ultra
4. High-energy Ion Telescope (HIT)
5. Solar Wind Electron instrument (SWE)
6. GLObal Solar Wind Structure (GLOWS)
7. Solar Wind And Pickup Ion (SWAPI)
8. IMAP-Hi
9. IMAP-Lo
10. Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE)

“So, IMAP is a mission that has 10 instruments that study the bubble that our sun has blown in interstellar space that we call the heliosphere. This is our solar neighborhood. This is the atmosphere of the sun that we and all the other planets in the solar system live in. It’s important for understanding why there’s life here on Earth,” Dr. Eric Christian, the NASA Senior Research scientist of IMAP, said to Spectrum News.

The mission will investigate how the sun’s charged particles are energized to form the solar wind and how the wind engages with interstellar space at the heliosphere’s boundary.

And it will support real-time observations of the solar wind that can damage technology, global communications, electrical grids and astronauts in space with dangerous particles and radiation.

“There’s actually storms in space that can affect satellites, astronauts. And we’re way behind terrestrial weather for predicting those storms. So, we want to undo the underlying science that will help us better predict space weather. And that’s what IMAP does,” Christian said.

The next craft going up is NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). This is a satellite that will observe solar wind and solar storm activity and collect data. Once the storm passes through the satellite, the satellite will collect information and send it back down to Earth.

And it will act as an early warning signal. It will track coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun and send that data back to Earth, and if those CMEs are potentially bad, officials will take measures to protect the power grid, planes in the air, and have astronauts go to a safe area on the International Space Station.

The third is the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, or Carruthers mission. It is named in honor of Dr. George Carruthers, who built a gold-plated telescope that was taken to the moon in 1972 during the Apollo 16 mission and used to look at Earth. The first photo of the geocorona was taken.

The Carruthers mission will study Earth’s outermost layer of the atmosphere, called the exosphere.

It is hoped that this craft will answer some questions about the exosphere, such as its size, shape and density.

“The exosphere, as the boundary between the atmosphere and the vacuum of space, is where planets can lose mass, particularly through the escape of hydrogen atoms. This process is directly linked to the permanent loss of surface water over geological timescales, a phenomenon observed on planets like Mars. By studying this escape, Carruthers helps us understand the long-term evolution of planetary habitability, revealing mechanisms for how planetary atmospheres change over time and how those changes can affect conditions for life,” NASA stated.