NASA's Massive IMAP Mission

On 30 November 2023,NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) successfully completed Key Decision Point D (KDP-D).This milestone allows the mission to move from development and design to assembly,testing and integration,NASA announced.As well,the launch date for the mission was moved from no sooner than February 2025,to a launch window of late April to late May 2025 to ensure the project team has adequate resources to address risks and technical complexities during system integration and testing.*IMAP is to fuction as a modern day cartographer and help us understand what happens when the solar wind,which is a constant stream of particles from the Sun,collides with materials from interstellar space.This will help researchers map the boundary of the heliosphere,the magnetic bubble created by the solar wind,and better understand how this bubble protects Earth from large amounts of harmful cosmic radiation (cosmic rays).Such radiation can threaten astronauts and technological systems.* The IMAP spacecraft is being built,and will be operated,by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel,Maryland.*The IMAP mission simaltaneously investigates two of the most important topics in Space Physics today-the acceleration of enrgetic particles and interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar medium.The mission is led by Principal Investigator Professor David McComas in the Space Physics at Princeton Group.The IMAP's 10 instruments provide the first comprehensive in-situ and remote global observations to discover the fundamental physical processes that control our solar system's evolving space environment.Among the Team's partners are NASA JPL-Caltech;Los Alamos National Laboratory;Imperial College London;Nagoya University,Japan;University of Central Lancashire;University of Bern,Switzerland;Massachussetts Institute of Technology;the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Physics,University of Colorado Boulder; and The University of Chicago.*Space Physics is defined as the study of natural phenomena that occur in our solar system.Specifically,the Sun,the particles and the radiation it creates,and how these affect the planets;the solar wind and its interaction with the Earth and near-Earth space (space weather).Another definition is that Space Physics is the study of plasmas as they occur naturally in the Earth's upper atmosphere (areonomy) and within the solar system.