NASA, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is preparing to launch three new spacecraft that will deepen our understanding of how the Sun shapes space weather across the solar system. The missions — NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) — are scheduled for launch no earlier than Tuesday, September 23.
They will ride together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida before heading toward their destination at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1 (L1), located about one million miles from Earth toward the Sun.
Each spacecraft has a distinct mission but shares a broader purpose: studying the solar wind — a constant stream of particles emitted by the Sun — and the changing conditions in space caused by solar activity. Together, their observations will help scientists understand the Sun’s impact on Earth’s environment, improve our ability to forecast space weather, and protect satellites, astronauts, and even airline operations.
The IMAP and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory missions add to NASA’s growing fleet dedicated to heliophysics, the study of the Sun’s interactions with the solar system. Meanwhile, NOAA’s SWFO-L1 marks the agency’s first satellite designed solely for real-time space weather monitoring, a step toward strengthening global preparedness against solar storms and their potential effects.
