NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched three new missions Wednesday to investigate the Sun’s influence across the solar system.
At 7:30 a.m. EDT, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying the agency’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) spacecraft.
“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 NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, “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.”
These missions will help safeguard both our ground-based technology, as well as our human and robotic space explorers from the harsh conditions known of space weather.
“As the United States prepares to send humans back to the Moon and onward to Mars, NASA and NOAA are providing the ultimate interplanetary survival guide to support humanity’s epic journey along the way,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Our scientific discoveries and technical innovations directly feed into our know-before-you-go roadmap to ensure a prepared, safe, and sustained human presence on other worlds.”
New science to protect society
Each mission will investigate different effects of space weather and the solar wind, which is a continuous stream of particles emitted by the Sun, from their origins at the Sun all the way outward to interstellar space.
“These three unique missions will help us get to know our Sun and its effects on Earth better than ever before,” said Joe Westlake, Heliophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. “This knowledge is critical because the Sun’s activity directly impacts our daily lives, from power grids to GPS. These missions will help us ensure the safety and resilience of our interconnected world.”
The IMAP mission will chart the boundary of the heliosphere, a bubble inflated by the solar wind that shields our solar system from galactic cosmic rays — a key protection that helps make our planet habitable. In addition, the spacecraft will sample and measure solar wind particles streaming outward from the Sun, as well as energetic particles streaming inward from the boundary of our solar system and beyond.
“IMAP will help us better understand how the space environment can harm us and our technologies, and discover the science of our solar neighborhood,” said David McComas, IMAP mission principal investigator at Princeton University in New Jersey.
The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is the first mission dedicated to recording changes in the outermost layer of our atmosphere, the exosphere, which plays an important role in Earth’s response to space weather. By studying the geocorona — the ultraviolet glow given off by the exosphere when sunlight shines on it — the Carruthers mission will reveal how the exosphere responds to solar storms and how it changes with the seasons. The mission builds on the legacy of the first instrument to image the geocorona, which flew to the Moon aboard Apollo 16 and was built and designed by scientist, inventor, engineer, and educator Dr. George Carruthers.
“The Carruthers mission will show us how the exosphere works and will help improve our ability to predict the impacts of solar activity here on Earth,” said Lara Waldrop, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The first of its kind, NOAA’s SWFO-L1 is designed to be a full-time operational space weather observatory. By keeping a watchful eye on the Sun’s activity and space conditions near Earth 24/7, and without interruption or obstruction, SWFO-L1 will provide quicker and more accurate space weather forecasts than ever before.
“This is the first of a new generation of NOAA space weather observatories dedicated to 24/7 operations, working to avoid gaps in continuity. Real-time observations from SWFO-L1 will give operators the trusted data necessary to issue advance warnings so that decision-makers can take early action to protect vital infrastructure, economic interests, and national security on Earth and in space. It’s about safeguarding society against space weather hazards,” said Richard Ullman, deputy director of the Office of Space Weather Observations at NOAA.
Next steps
In the hours after launch, all three spacecraft successfully deployed from the rocket and sent signals to Earth to confirm they’re active and working well.
Over the next few months, the spacecraft will make their way to their destination — a location between Earth and the Sun, about a million miles from Earth, called Lagrange point 1 (L1). They should arrive by January and, once their instrument checkouts and calibrations are complete, begin their missions to better understand space weather and protect humanity.
David McComas of Princeton University leads the IMAP mission with an international team of 27 partner institutions. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, built the spacecraft and will operate the mission.
The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission is led by Lara Waldrop from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Mission implementation is led by the Space Sciences Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley, which also designed and built the two ultraviolet imagers. BAE Systems designed and built the Carruthers spacecraft.
The Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the IMAP and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
The SWFO-L1 mission is managed by NOAA and developed with NASA Goddard, and commercial partners. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, manages the launch service for the missions.
To learn more about these missions, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/sun
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Meanwhile they’re learning a lot from Parker
https://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
…completed its 25th close approach to the Sun on Sept. 15, matching its record distance of 3.8 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) from the solar surface.
Fascinating, as Spock might say.
Story Tip: “California Solar Energy Plant to Close After Failing to Meet Expectations”. The plant is the Ivanpah Solar Plant in the Mojave Desert.
Reminds me of the time Peggy Sue Sears closed me for failing to meet expectations.
And how long did it take them to realize Ivanpah was failing to meet expectations? Decades?
Realising only becomes a thing when people refuse to put up with it any longer.
Or pay for it anymore.
The desert eyesore started construction in 2010 and was commissioned in Feb 2014. Google was an early investor but pulled out in 2011 when the cost of PV plummeted. PG&E was the only CA power company purchasing electricity from it and they stopped buying from it this year. It was intended to be in operation until 2039. It never provided more than 75% of it’s planned electricity production, but that must’ve been rare. I used to drive by it a few times a year and often would see only 1 or 2 of the 3 water towers illuminated.
It requires a sh!t ton of natural gas to start up before the sun rises. You just can’t make that kind of stupid hilarity up. It uses over 170,000 mirrors that now have to be disposed of somehow. The whole thing was just a typical California virtue signaling boondoggle whose cost was footed by taxpayers to the tune of 2.2 billion dollars.
If only that money was invested in either oil refineries or water reservoirs, CA would be in a much better place. But, alas, tis CA we’re talking about.
And Obama/Dem graft.
Good to see them back to doing actual science. ‘Bout time.
Indeed it is. But isn’t it too late for that now? Nasa – putting the fantasy of its new SLS rocket aside – hands out contracts to SpaceX for manned spaceflght and others for other things.
If I were a betting man I’d bet Elon Musk (weirdly predicted by Werner von Braun) is the progenitor of Weyland-Yutani:
Building better worlds.
Like the US Dept. of Agriculture. I get their e-newsletter from its forestry section. The email contents used to be nothing but climate BS. Now it never mentions the word climate nor CO2!
Elections have consequences.
Completely and utterly off topic.
Somewhere in the White House their is a gallery with pictures of all the presidents.
Someone in the White House recently replaced Biden’s picture with a picture of the AutoPen.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6380090958112
That’s wrong, but it’s still very, very, funny.
Thx for the laugh !
“future missions to the Moon and Mars”
I submit that there is nothing on either body which justifies the expense of sending astronauts there. Anyone who disagrees should be required to vindicate their opinion with their own investors’ money, and leave the taxpayers out of it. We are not “going to the stars”, unless someone comes up with a radical new understanding of physics which allows for faster than light travel. I’m tired of having to help pay for vanity science projects which exist mainly to pad resumes.
New studies have been presented that suggest humans cannot endure in space for the time interval needed to get to Mars. Physiological deterioration in space is known, but these reports indicate the early guesses were too optimistic.
They need a little bit of artificial gravity on the trip to Mars and back.
They could use some in low-Earth orbit, too.
People have lived on the space station for longer than the trip to Mars would take.
The reported results were from examining some of those long term space denizens.
My sentiments as well. There’s a reason why we had guys running around on the moon 60 years ago and no one has bothered to go back.
“On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed their lunar module on a broad dark lunar lava flow, called the Sea of Tranquility.”
I’d rather see the money dumped into research for FTL travel. All of the money will be wasted in the nearest pizza shop to the campus where the contract-winning physics campus resides, but at least they might drive down the local cost of pizza.
My vote for use of the money: fusion research
And if we just have to go back to the Moon, or Mars, let’s send AI run robots.
There is so much on our planet and in our seas that has not been studied at all and that could be studied for a small fraction of the expense of these NASA projects which are lunacy.
We can do multiple things at once. Doing one doesn’t preclude doing others.
Story Tip
Very interesting post on Judith Curry’s site.
https://judithcurry.com/2025/09/23/natural-selection-of-bad-science-part-ii/
I have often worried that the practice of taking the average of a bunch of models (as in the spaghetti graph) is wrong, but never been able to articulate exactly why. This piece gives a clear and succinct explanation, and it is indeed wrong and statistically illiterate. A sample quote:
“Ensemble methods assume that, in some relevant respect, the set of available models represent something like a sample of independent draws from the space of possible model structures. This is surely the greatest problem with ensemble statistical methods. The average and standard deviation of a set of trials is only meaningful if those trials represent a random sample of independent draws from the relevant space—in this case the space of possible model structures. Many commentators have noted that this assumption is not met by the set of climate models on the market…Perhaps we are meant to assume, instead, that the existing models are randomly distributed around the ideal model, in some kind of normal distribution, on analogy to measurement theory. But modeling isn’t measurement, and so there is very little reason to think this assumption holds.”
I think this will be of great value to lots of people who have felt there is something wrong here, but not been able to formulate precisely what it is. Once clearly explained it is obvious and confirms one’s intuition.
It never made any sense to me that you could take the mean of a bunch of failing and somewhat successful models. The thing that is puzzling is why you pick these particular models to average, why not include all failing models, why not ones including green cheese? Well, this piece explains why its silly, and also explains why its quite often done. Very illuminating.
Waiting for AlanJ to show up to comment how smart he is and how stoopid and wrong Dr. Curry is.
“These three unique missions will help us get to know our Sun and its effects on Earth better than ever before,”
So the satellites will also give us information on how the Sun affects our atmospheric temperature, i.e., Climate Change (the concept formerly known as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming)? I’m amazed that the article didn’t mention this additional benefit.
From https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/is-the-sun-causing-global-warming/
“No. The Sun can influence Earth’s climate, but it isn’t responsible for the warming trend we’ve seen over recent decades. The Sun is a giver of life; it helps keep the planet warm enough for us to survive. We know subtle changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun are responsible for the comings and goings of the ice ages. But the warming we’ve seen in recent decades is too rapid to be linked to changes in Earth’s orbit and too large to be caused by solar activity.” {my bold}
Surprising that ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are interchangeable terms when NASA has this view (and they are the ‘experts’ we should believe, aren’t they?)
“But the warming we’ve seen in recent decades is too rapid”
Unsupported assertion.
I suppose there is some value in what they are trying to do, I don’t know. What I do know is there is damn little reason to trust their work after their CAGW catastrophe, which continues to this day.
Why were three separate spacecraft needed? The all are going to Lagrange point 1. Surely it would have been cheaper and more efficient to create just one spacecraft, so there is just one propulsion and guidance system, etc.
Perhaps some of the detectors would interfere with other stuff on the spacecraft? Though, it wouldn’t be the first time NASA did something stupid. (e.g. send lander to mars to collect samples, without having a spacecraft ready to bring them back)