ROCKET LAUNCH: David McComas, right, IMAP mission lead, and Jamie Rankin, SWAP1 instrument lead, stand on the NASA balcony at Kennedy Space Center in Florida from which they watched the launch just moments before. McComas is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and Rankin is a Princeton research scholar and lecturer. (Photo by Princeton University, Molly Seltzer)
By Donald Gilpin
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:30 a.m. just after sunrise on September 24 carrying IMAP, a Princeton University-led mission to examine the impact of the sun on its space environment.
“It was an incredible launch and the mission’s just the beginning,” said Princeton University Astrophysical Sciences Professor David McComas, who leads the IMAP Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe mission. “Now that the space craft is in space and we’re turning on the spacecraft and instrument, what’s most exciting is all the great science we have yet to discover. There’s science we expect to do and then on every mission we learn new things we couldn’t possibly have expected at launch — that’s even more thrilling!”
The IMAP team of institutions and major suppliers — which includes 82 U.S. partners in 35 states, plus the United Kingdom, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan — carries 10 instruments designed to expand scientists’ understanding of the heliosphere (the region surrounding the sun and the solar system) and monitor massive solar storms that can disrupt Earth’s electromagnetic systems.
“I’m feeling relieved, thrilled, excited, and awed,” said Jamie Rankin, a research scholar and lecturer in astrophysical sciences at Princeton and the instrument lead for SWAPI (Solar Wind and Pickup Ion), which was built on the Princeton campus and is one of the 10 instruments carried by IMAP. “Relieved because IMAP and all of its instruments — including SWAPI are in space, which is the very best place for them to be. Thrilled because we got to experience the launch.”
McComas is on sabbatical from Princeton this semester and is heading to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which is overseeing IMAP’s instruments as they turn on in the coming weeks.
Rankin has returned from Florida to Princeton, where she is teaching McComas’ Space Physics Laboratory class, described on the University website as “a hands-on experience for Princeton undergraduates working together on a significant and open-ended experimental project in the Space Physics laboratory alongside the development of NASA flight hardware.”
She described her experience at the launch. “Not only did we get to see the liftoff from Earth, but there’s a brief moment in the SpaceX feed, right before IMAP was deployed, where we can see SWAPI along with three other instruments, peeking out from below the spacecraft, back-lit by the sun,” she said. “So there’s actually an image of SWAPI in space. How cool is that!?”
She went on to note that in about six weeks SWAPI will be fully turned on and operational, monitoring the million mile per hour solar wind along with the sun’s interaction with the winds of interstellar space (pickup ions). “I feel so incredibly blessed to be playing a role as this little piece of history is being made,” she said.
The Falcon rocket carrying IMAP was also carrying the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, another NASA mission, and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) mission known as the Space Weather Follow-On-Lagrange 1.
The three spacecraft, which are all studying the solar wind (charged particles from the sun) and its effects on Earth and space, separated from the rocket’s second stage about an hour and a half after lift-off.
“This successful launch advances the space weather readiness of our nation to better protect our satellites, interplanetary missions, and space-faring astronauts from the dangers of space weather throughout the solar system,” said acting NAS Administrator Sean Duffy as quoted in a September 24 NASA press release. “This insight will be critical as we prepare for future missions to the moon and Mars in our endeavor to keep America first in space.”
In the next few months, the three spacecraft will fly towards the sun, settling in a stable location where gravity from the sun is balanced, about one million miles from Earth. From there, according to a Princeton University press release, IMAP will investigate the outermost boundary of the heliosphere, the cosmic shield that protects the solar system from harmful cosmic radiation, and will also examine the solar wind and the mysterious acceleration of those solar particles.
IMAP will collect passing solar particles and particles returning from the cosmic shield.
“We’ll see the whole life cycle of these articles,” said McComas. “It’s a really incredibly exciting mission, where we’re able to do the entire life cycle of these particles, and understand, I think for the first time, the holistic view of how this region of space around us, our solar neighborhood, really works. It’s going to be a fabulous mission.”