NASA’s IMAP Mission to Study Boundaries of Our Home in Space

Summary

• The new nasa cartography and interstellar acceleration probe, or IMAP, will launch on Tuesday September 23 to study the heliosphere, a giant shield created by the sun.
• The mission will draw the limits of the heliosphere to help us better understand the protection that it offers life on earth and how it changes with the activity of the sun.
• The IMAP mission will also provide almost real measurement of solar wind, data that can be used to improve models predicting the impacts of space weather ranging from the disturbances of the power line to the loss of satellites, including the health of astronauts.

Space is a dangerous place – the one that NASA continues to explore for everyone’s benefit. It is filled with radiation and high energy particles which can damage DNA and printed circuits. However, life continues in our solar system in part because of the heliosphere, a giant bubble created by the sun which extends far beyond the orbit of Neptune.

With the new NASA cartography and interstellar acceleration probe, or IMAP, launching on Tuesday, September 23, humanity should have a better overview of the heliosphere than ever. The mission will draw the limits of the heliosphere to help us better understand the protection it offers and how it changes with the activity of the sun. The IMAP mission will also provide almost real measures of essential space weather conditions for the Artemis campaign and travel in deep space.

“With IMAP, we will advance the limits of knowledge and understanding of our place not only in the solar system, but in our place in the Galaxy as a whole,” said Patrick Koehn, scientist of the IMAP program at the NASA headquarters in Washington. “While humanity develops and explores beyond the earth, missions like IMAP will add new pieces of the meteorological puzzle of the space which fills the space between the solar probe Parker in the sun and the travels beyond the heliopause.”

Download this video from the NASA scientific visualization studio.

The heliosphere is created by the constant flow of the material and magnetic fields of the sun called the solar wind. As the solar system moves through the Milky Way, the interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar material sculpts the bubble of the heliosphere. The study of the heliosphere helps scientists understand our house in space and how it has become habitable.

As a modern celestial cartographer, IMAP will map the border of our heliosphere and study how the heliosphere interacts with the local galactic district beyond. It will draw the wide range of particles, dust, ultraviolet light and magnetic fields in the interplanetary space, to study the energy of the particles loaded with the sun and their interaction with the interstellar space.

The IMAP mission is based on Voyager and IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) missions of NASA. In 2012 and 2018, the Jumeau Voyager spacecraft became the first objects of human manufacture to cross the border of the heliosphere and to return measures of interstellar space. This gave scientists an instantaneous what the border looked like and where it was in two specific places. While Ibex has mapped the heliosphere, he left many unanswered questions. With a resolution 30 times higher and faster imaging, IMAP will help fill the unknowns on the heliosphere.

Of the 10 instruments of the IMAP, three will study the limits of the heliosphere by collecting neutral energy atoms, or ENAS. Many ENAs are from particles charged positively released by the sun, but after having crossed the solar system, these particles run particles in interstellar space. In this collision, some of these positively charged particles become neutral and a neutral energy atom was born. The interaction also redirects the new Enas, and a little ricochet towards the sun.

The charged particles are forced to follow the magnetic field lines, but the ENAS move in a straight line, not affected by the twists and turns, the turns and turbulances in the magnetic fields which permeate the space and shape the limit of the heliosphere. This means that scientists can follow where these atomic messengers come from and study the distant regions of space from afar. The IMAP mission will use the ENAS it collects near the earth to retrace their origins and build maps of the boundaries of the heliosphere, which would otherwise be invisible to such a distance.

“With its full cutting edge instruments, IMAP will make our understanding of two fundamental questions progress on how the particles are energetic and transported throughout the heliosphere and how the heliosphere itself interacts with our Galaxy Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The IMAP mission will also support real -time observations from solar wind and energy solar particles, which can produce dangerous conditions in the space environment near the earth. From its location to Lagrange Point 1, about 1 million kilometers from the earth to the sun, Imap will provide about half an hour of warning from dangerous particles directed to our planet. The mission data will contribute to the development of models which can predict the impacts of the space weather conditions ranging from disturbances of the electric line to the loss of satellites.

“The IMAP mission will provide very important information for traveling in deep space, where astronauts will be directly exposed to the dangers of solar wind,” said David McComas, principal investigator of the IMAP at Princeton University.

In addition to measuring the ENAS and the solar wind particles, the IMAP will also make direct measurements of interstellar dust – tufts of particles from the outside of the solar system which are smaller than a grain of sand. This space dust is largely made up of rocky or rich in carbon grains remaining following the Supernova explosions.

The specific elementary composition of this space dust is a postmark where it comes in the galaxy. The study of cosmic dust can give an overview of the stars compositions from afar outside our solar system. It will also help scientists considerably advance what we know about these basic cosmic building materials and provide information on materials between stars.

David McComas heads the mission with an international team of 27 partner institutions. APL manages the development phase and builds the spaceship, and it will exploit the mission. The IMAP is the fifth mission of the NASA Solar Terresrial Program portfolio. The Division of NASA Goddard Explorers and Heliophysics projects manages the STP program for the Heliophysical Division of the NASA Scientific Mission Agency. The NASA launching services program, based in NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the mission launch service.

By Mara Johnson-Groh
Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, Greenbelt, MD.