Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
6 min read
NASA’s IMAP Mission to Study Boundaries of Our Home in Space
Summary
NASA’s new Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23 to study the heliosphere, a giant shield created by the Sun. The mission will chart the heliosphere’s boundaries to help us better understand the protection it offers life on Earth and how it changes with the Sun’s activity. The IMAP mission will also provide near real-time measurements of the solar wind, data that can be used to improve models predicting the impacts of space weather ranging from power-line disruptions to loss of satellites, to the health of voyaging astronauts. Space is a dangerous place — one that NASA continues to explore for the benefit of all. It’s filled with radiation and high-energy particles that can damage DNA and circuit boards alike. Yet life endures in our solar system in part because of the heliosphere, a giant bubble created by the Sun that extends far beyond Neptune’s orbit.
With NASA’s new Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, launching no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23, humanity is set to get a better look at the heliosphere than ever before. The mission will chart the boundaries of the heliosphere to help us better understand the protection it offers and how it changes with the Sun’s activity. The IMAP mission will also provide near real-time measurements of space weather conditions essential for the Artemis campaign and deep space travel.
“With IMAP, we’ll push forward the boundaries of knowledge and understanding of our place not only in the solar system, but our place in the galaxy as a whole,” said Patrick Koehn, IMAP program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As humanity expands and explores beyond Earth, missions like IMAP will add new pieces of the space weather puzzle that fills the space between Parker Solar Probe at the Sun and the Voyagers beyond the heliopause.”
Download this video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
Domain of Sun
The heliosphere is created by the constant outflow of material and magnetic fields from the Sun called the solar wind. As the solar system moves through the Milky Way, the solar wind’s interaction with interstellar material carves out the bubble of the heliosphere. Studying the heliosphere helps scientists understand our home in space and how it came to be habitable.
As a modern-day celestial cartographer, IMAP will map the boundary of our heliosphere and study how the heliosphere interacts with the local galactic neighborhood beyond. It will chart the vast range of particles, dust, ultraviolet light, and magnetic fields in interplanetary space, to investigate the energization of charged particles from the Sun and their interaction with interstellar space.
The IMAP mission builds on NASA’s Voyager and IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) missions. In 2012 and 2018, the twin Voyager spacecraft became the first human-made objects to cross the heliosphere’s boundary and send back measurements from interstellar space. It gave scientists a snapshot of what the boundary looked like and where it was in two specific locations. While IBEX has been mapping the heliosphere, it has left many questions unanswered. With 30 times higher resolution and faster imaging, IMAP will help fill in the unknowns about the heliosphere.
Energetic neutral atoms: atomic messengers from our heliosphere’s edge
Of IMAP’s 10 instruments, three will investigate the boundaries of the heliosphere by collecting energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs. Many ENAs originate as positively charged particles released by the Sun but after racing across the solar system, these particles run into particles in interstellar space. In this collision, some of those positively charged particles become neutral, and an energetic neutral atom is born. The interaction also redirects the new ENAs, and some ricochet back toward the Sun.
Charged particles are forced to follow magnetic field lines, but ENAs travel in a straight line, unaffected by the twists, turns, and turbulences in the magnetic fields that permeate space and shape the boundary of the heliosphere. This means scientists can track where these atomic messengers came from and study distant regions of space from afar. The IMAP mission will use the ENAs it collects near Earth to trace back their origins and construct maps of the boundaries of the heliosphere, which would otherwise be invisible from such a distance.
“With its comprehensive state-of-the-art suite of instruments, IMAP will advance our understanding of two fundamental questions of how particles are energized and transported throughout the heliosphere and how the heliosphere itself interacts with our galaxy,” said Shri Kanekal, IMAP mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The IMAP mission will study the heliosphere, our home in space. NASA/Princeton University/Patrick McPike Space weather: monitoring solar wind
The IMAP mission will also support near real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic solar particles, which can produce hazardous conditions in the space environment near Earth. From its location at Lagrange Point 1, about 1 million miles from Earth toward the Sun, IMAP will provide around a half hour’s warning of dangerous particles headed toward our planet. The mission’s data will help with the development of models that can predict the impacts of space weather ranging from power-line disruptions to loss of satellites.
“The IMAP mission will provide very important information for deep space travel, where astronauts will be directly exposed to the dangers of the solar wind,” said David McComas, IMAP principal investigator at Princeton University.
Cosmic dust: hints of the galaxy beyond
In addition to measuring ENAs and solar wind particles, IMAP will also make direct measurements of interstellar dust — clumps of particles originating outside of the solar system that are smaller than a grain of sand. This space dust is largely composed of rocky or carbon-rich grains leftover from the aftermath of supernova explosions.
The specific elemental composition of this space dust is a postmark for where it comes from in the galaxy. Studying cosmic dust can provide insight into the compositions of stars from far outside our solar system. It will also help scientists significantly advance what we know about these basic cosmic building materials and provide information on what the material between stars is made of.
David McComas leads the mission with an international team of 27 partner institutions. APL is managing the development phase and building the spacecraft, and it will operate the mission. IMAP is the fifth mission in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes Program portfolio. The Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division at NASA Goddard manages the STP Program for the agency’s Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the launch service for the mission.
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 Related Terms
Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) Missions NASA Centers & Facilities NASA Directorates Science & Research Science Mission Directorate Explore More
4 min read NASA Interns Apply NASA data to Real-World Problems to Advance Space Research and Aerospace Innovation
Article
2 hours ago
3 min read Regions on Asteroid Explored by NASA’s Lucy Mission Get Official Names
The IAU (International Astronomical Union), a global naming authority for celestial objects, has approved official…
Article
1 day ago
5 min read Connecting Educators with NASA Data: Learning Ecosystems Northeast in Action
Article
2 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help scientists better understand our Milky Way galaxy’s less sparkly components — gas and dust strewn between stars, known as the interstellar medium.
One of Roman’s major observing programs, called the Galactic Plane Survey, will peer through our galaxy to its most distant edge, mapping roughly 20 billion stars—about four times more than have currently been mapped. Scientists will use data from these stars to study and map the dust their light travels through, contributing to the most complete picture yet of the Milky Way’s structure, star formation, and the origins of our solar system.
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to more than 100 billion stars that are often separated by trillions of miles. The spaces in between, called the interstellar medium, aren’t empty — they’re sprinkled with gas and dust that are both the seeds of new stars and the leftover crumbs from stars long dead. Studying the interstellar medium with observatories like NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will reveal new insight into the galactic dust recycling system.
Credit: NASA/Laine Havens; Music credit: Building Heroes by Enrico Cacace [BMI], Universal Production Music “With Roman, we’ll be able to turn existing artist’s conceptions of the Milky Way into more data-driven models using new constraints on the 3D distribution of interstellar dust,” said Catherine Zucker, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Solving Milky Way mystery
Scientists know how our galaxy likely looks by combining observations of the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies. But dust clouds make it hard to work out the details on the opposite side of our galaxy. Imagine trying to map a neighborhood while looking through the windows of a house surrounded by a dense fog.
Roman will see through the “fog” of dust using a specialized camera and filters that observe infrared light — light with longer wavelengths than our eyes can detect. Infrared light is more likely to pass through dust clouds without scattering.
This artist’s concept visualizes different types of light moving through a cloud of particles. Since infrared light has a longer wavelength, it can pass more easily through the dust. That means astronomers observing in infrared light can peer deeper into dusty regions.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Light with shorter wavelengths, including blue light produced by stars, more easily scatters. That means stars shining through dust appear dimmer and redder than they actually are.
By comparing the observations with information on the source star’s characteristics, astronomers can disentangle the star’s distance from how much its colors have been reddened. Studying those effects reveals clues about the dust’s properties.
“I can ask, ‘how much redder and dimmer is the starlight that Roman detects at different wavelengths?’ Then, I can take that information and relate it back to the properties of the dust grains themselves, and in particular their size,” said Brandon Hensley, a scientist who studies interstellar dust at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Scientists will also learn about the dust’s composition and probe clouds to investigate the physical processes behind changing dust properties.
Clues in dust-influenced starlight hint at the amount of dust between us and a star. Piecing together results from many stars allows astronomers to construct detailed 3D dust maps. That would enable scientists like Zucker to create a model of the Milky Way, which will show us how it looks from the outside. Then scientists can better compare the Milky Way with other galaxies that we only observe from the outside, slotting it into a cosmological perspective of galaxy evolution.
“Roman will add a whole new dimension to our understanding of the galaxy because we’ll see billions and billions more stars,” Zucker said. “Once we observe the stars, we’ll have the dust data as well because its effects are encoded in every star Roman detects.”
Galactic life cycles
The interstellar medium does more than mill about the Milky Way — it fuels star and planet formation. Dense blobs of interstellar medium form molecular clouds, which can gravitationally collapse and kick off the first stages of star development. Young stars eject hot winds that can cause surrounding dust to clump into planetary building blocks.
“Dust carries a lot of information about our origins and how everything came to be,” said Josh Peek, an associate astronomer and head of the data science mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “Right now, we’re basically standing on a really large dust grain — Earth was built out of lots and lots of really tiny grains that grew together into a giant ball.”
Roman will identify young clusters of stars in new, distant star-forming regions as well as contribute data on “star factories” previously identified by missions like NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
“If you want to understand star formation in different environments, you have to understand the interstellar landscape that seeds it,” Zucker said. “Roman will allow us to link the 3D structure of the interstellar medium with the 3D distribution of young stars across the galaxy’s disk.”
Roman’s new 3D dust maps will refine our understanding of the Milky Way’s spiral structure, the pinwheel-like pattern where stars, gas, and dust bunch up like galactic traffic jams. By combining velocity data with dust maps, scientists will compare observations with predictions from models to help identify the cause of spiral structure—currently unclear.
The role that this spiral pattern plays in star formation remains similarly uncertain. Some theories suggest that galactic congestion triggers star formation, while others contend that these traffic jams gather material but do not stimulate star birth.
Roman will help to solve mysteries like these by providing more data on dusty regions across the entire Milky Way. That will enable scientists to compare many galactic environments and study star birth in specific structures, like the galaxy’s winding spiral arms or its central stellar bar.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will conduct a Galactic Plane Survey to explore our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The survey will map around 20 billion stars, each encoding information about intervening dust and gas called the interstellar medium. Studying the interstellar medium could offer clues about our galaxy’s spiral arms, galactic recycling, and much more.
Credit: NASA, STScI, Caltech/IPAC The astronomy community is currently in the final stages of planning for Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey.
“With Roman’s massive survey of the galactic plane, we’ll be able to have this deep technical understanding of our galaxy,” Peek said.
After processing, Roman’s data will be available to the public online via the Roman Research Nexus and the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, which will each provide open access to the data for years to come.
“People who aren’t born yet are going to be able to do really cool analyses of this data,” Peek said. “We have a really beautiful piece of our heritage to hand down to future generations and to celebrate.”
Roman is slated to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward a potential early launch as soon as fall 2026.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/roman
By Laine Havens
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 16, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Galaxies Protostars Stars The Milky Way Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Roman Team Selects Survey to Map Our Galaxy’s Far Side
Article 2 years ago 6 min read NASA’s Roman Mission Shares Detailed Plans to Scour Skies
Article 5 months ago 7 min read One Survey by NASA’s Roman Could Unveil 100,000 Cosmic Explosions
Article 2 months ago View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Image: Webb image of a glittering glimpse of starbirth View the full article
-
By NASA
Explore Webb Webb News Latest News Latest Images Webb’s Blog Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Webb Timeline Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Science Explainers Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Webb’s First Images Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope
Webb captured this sparkling scene of star birth in Pismis 24. Full image and caption below. Credits:
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) This is a sparkling scene of star birth captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and radiation of nearby, massive, infant stars.
Called Pismis 24, this young star cluster resides in the core of the nearby Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Home to a vibrant stellar nursery and one of the closest sites of massive star birth, Pismis 24 provides rare insight into large and massive stars. Its proximity makes this region one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve.
At the heart of this glittering cluster is the brilliant Pismis 24-1. It is at the center of a clump of stars above the jagged orange peaks, and the tallest spire is pointing directly toward it. Pismis 24-1 appears as a gigantic single star, and it was once thought to be the most massive known star. Scientists have since learned that it is composed of at least two stars, though they cannot be resolved in this image. At 74 and 66 solar masses, respectively, the two known stars are still among the most massive and luminous stars ever seen.
Image A: Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)
Webb captured this sparkling scene of star birth in Pismis 24, a young star cluster about 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. This region is one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) Captured in infrared light by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), this image reveals thousands of jewel-like stars of varying sizes and colors. The largest and most brilliant ones with the six-point diffraction spikes are the most massive stars in the cluster. Hundreds to thousands of smaller members of the cluster appear as white, yellow, and red, depending on their stellar type and the amount of dust enshrouding them. Webb also shows us tens of thousands of stars behind the cluster that are part of the Milky Way galaxy.
Super-hot, infant stars –some almost 8 times the temperature of the Sun – blast out scorching radiation and punishing winds that are sculpting a cavity into the wall of the star-forming nebula. That nebula extends far beyond NIRCam’s field of view. Only small portions of it are visible at the bottom and top right of the image. Streamers of hot, ionized gas flow off the ridges of the nebula, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks.
Dramatic spires jut from the glowing wall of gas, resisting the relentless radiation and winds. They are like fingers pointing toward the hot, young stars that have sculpted them. The fierce forces shaping and compressing these spires cause new stars to form within them. The tallest spire spans about 5.4 light-years from its tip to the bottom of the image. More than 200 of our solar systems out to Neptune’s orbit could fit into the width its tip, which is 0.14 lightyears.
In this image, the color cyan indicates hot or ionized hydrogen gas being heated up by the massive young stars. Dust molecules similar to smoke here on Earth are represented in orange. Red signifies cooler, denser molecular hydrogen. The darker the red, the denser the gas. Black denotes the densest gas, which is not emitting light. The wispy white features are dust and gas that are scattering starlight.
Video A: Expedition to Star Cluster Pismis 24
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that
supports HTML5 video
This scientific visualization takes viewers on a journey to a glittering young star cluster called Pismis 24. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured this fantastical scene in the heart of the Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth. Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI), Christian Nieves (STScI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Script Writer: Frank Summers (STScI); Narration: Frank Summers (STScI); Music: Christian Nieves (STScI); Audio: Danielle Kirshenblat (STScI); Producer: Greg Bacon (STScI); Acknowledgment: VISTA Video B: Zoom to Pismis 24
This zoom-in video shows the location of the young star cluster Pismis 24 on the sky. It begins with a ground-based photo of the constellation Scorpius by the late astrophotographer Akira Fujii. The sequence closes in on the Lobster Nebula, using views from the Digitized Sky Survey. As the video homes in on a select portion, it fades to a VISTA image in infrared light. The zoom continues in to the region around Pismis 24, where it transitions to the stunning image captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light.
Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Narration: Frank Summers (STScI); Script Writer: Frank Summers (STScI); Music: Christian Nieves (STScI); Audio: Danielle Kirshenblat (STScI); Producer: Greg Bacon (STScI); Acknowledgment: VISTA, Akira Fujii, DSS The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
Downloads
Click any image to open a larger version.
View/Download all image products at all resolutions for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Ann Jenkins – jenkins@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
Read more about Hubble’s view of Pismis 24
Listen to a sonification of Hubble’s view of Pismis 24
Animation Video: “How Dense Pillars Form in Molecular Clouds”
Read more: Webb’s Star Formation Discoveries
More Webb News
More Webb Images
Webb Science Themes
Webb Mission Page
Related For Kids
What is the Webb Telescope?
SpacePlace for Kids
En Español
Ciencia de la NASA
NASA en español
Space Place para niños
Keep Exploring Related Topics
James Webb Space Telescope
Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
Stars
Stars Stories
Universe
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 04, 2025 Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) View the full article
-
By Space Force
Second Lt. Katherine Hendl escorted the remains of her great-great-uncle, a U.S. Army Air Forces gunner killed in action during World War II, home to Massachusetts nearly 80 years after he was declared missing in action.
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.