Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

NASA's Interstellar Mapping Probe Prepares for a 2025 Launch

IMAP will study the protective magnetic bubble that surrounds our solar system, called the heliosphere, and the particle acceleration that occurs across it. Credits: NASA/Princeton/Johns Hopkins APL/Josh Diaz

Engineers at NASA have completed an important milestone in developing the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft. It’s now moving from development and design to the assembly, testing, and integration phase, targeting a launch in late Spring 2025. After launch, the spacecraft will fly to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange Point and analyze how the Sun’s solar wind interacts with charged particles originating from outside the Solar System.

IMAP will follow up on discoveries and insights from the two Voyager spacecraft and the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and will help investigate two of the most important overarching issues in heliophysics: the energization of charged particles from the Sun and the interaction of the solar wind at its boundary with interstellar space.

Continue reading “NASA's Interstellar Mapping Probe Prepares for a 2025 Launch”
Posted on by Evan Gough

This is What the Solar System Really Looks Like

An updated model suggests the shape of the Sun’s bubble of influence, the heliosphere (seen in yellow), may be a deflated croissant shape, rather than the long-tailed comet shape suggested by other research. Credits: Opher, et al

At first glance, it looks like something from an alien autopsy. A strange organ cut from a xenomorph’s thorax, under the flickering lights of an operating room in a top secret government facility, with venous tendrils dangling down to the floor, dripping viscous slime. (X-Com anyone?)

But no, it’s just our Solar System.

Continue reading “This is What the Solar System Really Looks Like”