KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – NASA is set to launch three satellites Wednesday aimed at tracking solar storms and improving forecasts of space weather that can affect life on Earth.
What we know:
NASA is upgrading its satellites around the sun with its latest space weather tracking mission. It’s three satellites strapped into one Falcon 9 – all with different missions but mostly focusing on the sun.
Liftoff is scheduled for Wednesday morning at 7:30 a.m. from KSC Launch Complex 39-A on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
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NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, will create detailed maps of the bubble that protects our entire solar system. Launching alongside IMAP is NOAA’s critical space weather tracking satellite.
This is NASA and NOAA’s first satellite observatory designed specifically for – and fully dedicated to – continuous, space weather observations that will provide a critical early warning for incoming solar storms that can threaten astronauts, satellites, and infrastructure on earth.
Why you should care:
When space weather goes wild, it can affect infrastructure and operations here on earth in several areas, including power grids, GPS, search and rescue missions and even national security. Scientists want to be able to predict storms, like we do with hurricanes, so people can prepare if they could be affected.
What’s next:
After liftoff, it will take about four months for the satellites to reach the final destination about a million miles away from earth. The data will eventually be used to increase solar storm predictions so forecasters can warn the people and industries sooner rather than later.
What they’re saying:
Scientists say it’s long overdue to upgrade these satellites because some have been in use for about 30 years.
“The data will come to us faster, more reliably, and so we’ll have all that knowledge now working to our advantage,” said Dimitrios Vassiliadis, who’s a SWFO-L1 program scientist for NOAA.
Strengthening space weather predictions will also help astronauts heading to the moon and Mars.
“How are we going to tell the crew on the vehicles going to Mars and then on the Martian surface that, again doesn’t have a big protective magnetic field,” said Nicky Fox, who’s the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
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The Source: This story was written based on information shared by NASA.