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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.
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 Related Terms
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On Sept. 9, 2025, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of the Sun.NASA/GSFC/Solar Dynamics Observatory It looked like the Sun was heading toward a historic lull in activity. That trend flipped in 2008, according to new research.
The Sun has become increasingly active since 2008, a new NASA study shows. Solar activity is known to fluctuate in cycles of 11 years, but there are longer-term variations that can last decades. Case in point: Since the 1980s, the amount of solar activity had been steadily decreasing all the way up to 2008, when solar activity was the weakest on record. At that point, scientists expected the Sun to be entering a period of historically low activity.
But then the Sun reversed course and started to become increasingly active, as documented in the study, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s a trend that researchers said could lead to an uptick in space weather events, such as solar storms, flares, and coronal mass ejections.
“All signs were pointing to the Sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity,” said Jamie Jasinski of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, lead author of the new study. “So it was a surprise to see that trend reversed. The Sun is slowly waking up.”
The earliest recorded tracking of solar activity began in the early 1600s, when astronomers, including Galileo, counted sunspots and documented their changes. Sunspots are cooler, darker regions on the Sun’s surface that are produced by a concentration of magnetic field lines. Areas with sunspots are often associated with higher solar activity, such as solar flares, which are intense bursts of radiation, and coronal mass ejections, which are huge bubbles of plasma that erupt from the Sun’s surface and streak across the solar system.
NASA scientists track these space weather events because they can affect spacecraft, astronauts’ safety, radio communications, GPS, and even power grids on Earth. Space weather predictions are critical for supporting the spacecraft and astronauts of NASA’s Artemis campaign, as understanding the space environment is a vital part of mitigating astronaut exposure to space radiation.
Launching no earlier than Sept. 23, NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory missions, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) mission, will provide new space weather research and observations that will help to drive future efforts at the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Solar activity affects the magnetic fields of planets throughout the solar system. As the solar wind — a stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun — and other solar activity increase, the Sun’s influence expands and compresses magnetospheres, which serve as protective bubbles of planets with magnetic cores and magnetic fields, including Earth. These protective bubbles are important for shielding planets from the jets of plasma that stream out from the Sun in the solar wind.
Over the centuries that people have been studying solar activity, the quietest times were a three-decade stretch from 1645 to 1715 and a four-decade stretch from 1790 to 1830. “We don’t really know why the Sun went through a 40-year minimum starting in 1790,” Jasinski said. “The longer-term trends are a lot less predictable and are something we don’t completely understand yet.”
In the two-and-a-half decades leading up to 2008, sunspots and the solar wind decreased so much that researchers expected the “deep solar minimum” of 2008 to mark the start of a new historic low-activity time in the Sun’s recent history.
“But then the trend of declining solar wind ended, and since then plasma and magnetic field parameters have steadily been increasing,” said Jasinski, who led the analysis of heliospheric data publicly available in a platform called OMNIWeb Plus, run by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The data Jasinski and colleagues mined for the study came from a broad collection of NASA missions. Two primary sources — ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) and the Wind mission — launched in the 1990s and have been providing data on solar activity like plasma and energetic particles flowing from the Sun toward Earth. The spacecraft belong to a fleet of NASA Heliophysics Division missions designed to study the Sun’s influence on space, Earth, and other planets.
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Abbey Interrante
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov
2025-118
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Last Updated Sep 15, 2025 Related Terms
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While auroras are a beautiful sight on Earth, the solar activity that causes them can wreak havoc with space-based infrastructure like satellites. Using artificial intelligence to predict these disruptive solar events was a focus of KX’s work with FDL.Credit: Sebastian Saarloos In the summer of 2024, people across North America were amazed when auroras lit up the night sky across their hometowns, but the same solar activity that makes auroras can cause disruptions to satellites that are essential to systems on Earth. The solution to predicting these solar events and warning satellite operators may come through artificial intelligence.
The Frontier Development Lab of Mountain View, California, is an ongoing partnership between NASA and commercial AI firms to apply advanced machine learning to problems that matter to the agency and beyond. Since 2016, the Frontier Development Lab has applied AI on behalf of NASA in planetary defense, Heliophysics, Earth science, medicine, and lunar exploration.
Through a collaboration with a company called KX Systems, the Frontier Development Lab looked to use proven software in an innovative new way. The company’s flagship data analytics software, called kdb+, is typically used in the financial industry to keep track of rapid shifts in market trends, but the company was exploring how it could be used in space.
Between 2017 and 2019, KX Systems participated in the Frontier Development Lab partnership through NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. Working with NASA scientists, KX applied the capabilities of kdb+ to searching for exoplanets and predicting space weather, areas which could be improved with AI models. One question the Frontier Development Lab worked to answer was whether kdb+ could forecast the kind of space weather that creates the auroras to predict when GPS satellites might experience signal interruption due to the Sun.
By importing several datasets monitoring the ionosphere, solar activity, and Earth’s magnetic field, then applying machine learning algorithms to them, the Frontier Development Lab researchers were able to predict disruptive events up to 24 hours in advance.
While this was a scientific application of AI, KX Systems says some of this development work has made it back into its commercial offerings, as there are similarities between AI models developed to find patterns in satellite signal losses and ones that predict maintenance needs for industrial manufacturing equipment.
A division of FD Technologies plc., KX Systems is a technology company that offers database management and analytics software for customers that need to make decisions quickly. While KX started in 1993, its AI-driven business has grown considerably, and the company credits work done with NASA for accelerating some of its capabilities.
From protecting valuable satellites to keeping manufacturing lines moving at top performance, pairing NASA’s expertise with commercial ingenuity is a combination for success.
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By NASA
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows a brown dwarf — an object larger than a planet but not massive enough to kickstart fusion in its core like a star. Brown dwarfs are hot when they form and may glow like this one, but over time they get closer in temperature to gas giant planets like Jupiter. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why has silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, gone largely undetected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and gas planets like them orbiting other stars? A new study using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sheds light on this question by focusing on a peculiar object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “The Accident.”
The results were published on Sept. 4 in the journal Nature.
As shown in this graphic, brown dwarfs can be far more massive than even large gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn. However, they tend to lack the mass that kickstarts nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, causing them to shine. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Accident is a brown dwarf, a ball of gas that’s not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its already hard-to-classify peers, The Accident has a perplexing mix of physical features, some of which have been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs and others seen only in ancient ones. Because of those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The program lets people around the globe look for new discoveries in data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The brown dwarf nicknamed “The Accident” can be seen moving in the bottom left corner of this video, which shows data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), launched in 2009 with the moniker WISE. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dan Caselden The Accident is so faint and odd that researchers needed NASA’s most powerful space observatory, Webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule they couldn’t initially identify. It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called silane (SiH4). Researchers have long expected — but been unable — to find silane not only in our solar system’s gas giants, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and to the gas giants orbiting other stars. The Accident is the first such object where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are fairly confident that silicon exists in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres but that it is hidden. Bound to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz that can seed clouds on hot gas giants, bearing a resemblance to dust storms on Earth. On cooler gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would sink far beneath lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until any silicon-containing molecules are deep in the atmosphere, invisible even to the spacecraft that have studied those two planets up close.
Some researchers have also posited that lighter molecules of silicon, like silane, should be found higher up in these atmospheric layers, left behind like traces of flour on a baker’s table. That such molecules haven’t appeared anywhere except in a single, peculiar brown dwarf suggests something about the chemistry occurring in these environments.
“Sometimes it’s the extreme objects that help us understand what’s happening in the average ones,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and lead author on the new study.
Happy accident
Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident likely formed 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever discovered. The universe is about 14 billion years old, and at the time that The Accident developed, the cosmos contained mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements, including silicon. Over eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the cores of stars, so planets and stars that formed more recently possess more of those elements.
Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres. The fact that silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and gas giant planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it bonds with silicon at such a high rate and so easily, virtually no silicon is left over to bond with hydrogen and form silane.
So why is silane in The Accident? The study authors surmise it is because far less oxygen was present in the universe when the ancient brown dwarf formed, resulting in less oxygen in its atmosphere to gobble up all the silicon. The available silicon would have bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane.
“We weren’t looking to solve a mystery about Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said JPL’s Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which was later repurposed as NEOWISE. “A brown dwarf is a ball of gas like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it gets cooler and cooler, with an atmosphere like that of gas giant planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane. The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than gas giant exoplanets because the light from a faraway planet is typically drowned out by the star it orbits, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo. And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including ones outside our solar system that might feature potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we’re not finding life on brown dwarfs,” said Faherty. “But at a high level, by studying all of this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we’re setting up the scientists who are one day going to have to do this kind of chemical analysis for rocky, potentially Earth-like planets. It might not specifically involve silicon, but they’re going to get data that is complicated and confusing and doesn’t fit their models, just like we are. They’ll have to parse all those complexities if they want to answer those big questions.”
More about WISE, Webb
A division of Caltech, JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The NEOWISE mission was a project of JPL and the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
For more information about WISE, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory, and 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
News Media Contacts
Calla Cofield
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
cpulliam@stsci.edi
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 Related Terms
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