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.

Heliophysics Careers:NASA Announces Voyager 2 Has Entered Interstellar Space - plus the successors to the Voyager Insterstellar Mission (IBEX and the future probe,IMAP)

If you would like to consider a career in heliophysics or just increase your knowledge of the solar system and its immediate environment,the local interstellar medium,you need to catch up with the stunning developments of recent years.So this blog will try to get you up to speed.Indeed,a major breaking news item crossed the desk today:Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere,the region of strong solar influence,and entered the interstellar medium,the influence of the other stars in the Milky Way.This is six years after its twin,Voyager 1,left the heliosphere in 2012.
Comparing data from Voyager's instruments,it has been ascertained that the spacecraft crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere,the heliopause,on 5 November 2018.The heliopause is where the tenuous,hot solar wind meets the cold,dense interstellar medium,NASA said.Voyager 1,although it was launched 16 days later than Voyager 2,crossed the heliopause in 2012 because of its different trajectory than Voyager 2.Yet one of Voyager 1's instruments gave out in 1980,long before it neared the edge of the heliosphere.That means that Voyager 2,which has the same instrument,but in working order,can provide a unique data set on the nature of the gateway to interstellar space and the local interstellar medium.This working instrument is the Plasma Science Experiment (PLE),so that Voyager 1 made the same passage with one eye shut,so to speak;while Voyager 2 is traveling with eyes wide open.This is causing excitement on the Voyager team.
In any event,on 5 November,the PLE detected a sharp drop off in the speed of solar wind particles,and there has been no solar wind flow in Voyager 2's environment since then,and hence the scientists' conclusion that Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere.
Voyager 2's other working instruments are:
1.the cosmic ray subsystem;
2.the lower charged particle instrument;and
3.the magnetometer,all of which are recording data consistent with Voyager 2's having left the heliosphere. *
According to Voyager project scientist Ed Stone:
There is still a lot to learn about the region of interstellar space immediately beyond the heliopause.*
Adds Nicola Fox,director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA headquarters:
To have the Voyagers sending back information about the edge of the Sun's influence gives us an unprecedented glimpse of truly uncharted territory.*
The new successor mission to Voyager's Interstellar Mission is IMAP,the Insterstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe,scheduled for a 2024 launch.It will investigate the heliospheric Ribbon and other phenomena with a suite of 10 instruments.Resaerchers from institutions in Poland,Switzerland and Germany will be collaborating on the mission with the US team.
In the past decade, a successor to the Voyager Interstellar Mission,NASA's IBEX spacecraft,and Voyager 1 itself,have revolutionised heliophysics with their discoveries:
1.There is no bow shock wave near the edge of the heliosphere,which was postulated for so long;
2.There is a previously unknown Ribbon in the heliosphere that is two to three times brighter than anything in the sky.It is composed of energetic neutral atoms,or ENAs,the origin of which is unknown;
3.The heliosphere has the shape of a flattened globe with four tails;not the shape of a comet with a long tail!*
At MIT,heliophysics is classified as a branch of astrophysics.