BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – SpaceX has announced plans for its next NASA-affiliated mission from Florida’s Space Coast.
On its website, SpaceX says NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission will launch to interplanetary transfer orbit from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center.
IMAP, or the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, is a NASA heliophysics mission that will map the boundaries of the heliosphere: the large bubble created by the solar wind that encapsulates our entire solar system. IMAP will study how the heliosphere interacts with the local galactic neighborhood beyond and will support real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic particles, which can produce hazardous conditions near Earth. Falcon 9 will launch IMAP into a transfer orbit that will take it to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange Point – a gravitationally stable region 1.5 million kilometers from Earth (directly between Earth and the Sun) where the Sun and the Earth’s gravity essentially balance each other. Also on board the mission is NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1, which will also head to the Earth-Sun L1 point.
SpaceX
Liftoff is scheduled for 7:32 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 23. A backup opportunity will be available at 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24, if needed.
The Falcon 9 rocket booster supporting the mission will be making its second flight, having previously been used for a Project Kuiper launch in July.
After launching, the booster will attempt to land on SpaceX’s Just Read the Instructions droneship, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
News 6 will plan to stream the launch live at the top of this story.
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