Mapping the Boundaries of Our Home in Space with NASA’s IMAP Mission

  • Released Wednesday, September 17, 2025
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NASA’s new Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, will explore and map the very boundaries of our heliosphere — a huge bubble created by the Sun's wind that encapsulates our solar system — and study how that boundary interacts with the local galactic neighborhood beyond.

As a modern-day celestial cartographer, IMAP will chart the vast range of particles in interplanetary space, helping to investigate two of the most important overarching issues in heliophysics — the energization of charged particles from the Sun, and the interaction of the solar wind with interstellar space. Additionally, IMAP will support near real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic particles, which can produce hazardous conditions in the space environment near Earth.

IMAP is launching no earlier than Sept. 23, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Learn more about IMAP science: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/nasas-imap-mission-to-study-boundaries-of-our-home-in-space/
Find out more about the IMAP mission: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/imap/

Produced Video

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Complete transcript available.

Music credit: "Soaring Dreams” by Klas Johan Wahl and Anders Paul Niska [STIM], “Electric Works” by Philippe Lhommet [SACEM], and “Mercurial Temperment” by Christian Telfold [ASCAP] from Universal Production Music

Produced Video

An IMAP overview created for the launch broadcast.

Music Credit: "Soaring Dreams” by Klas Johan Wahl and Anders Paul Niska [STIM] from Universal Production Music

For More Information

See https://science.nasa.gov/mission/imap/

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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This page was originally published on Wednesday, September 17, 2025.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 12:47 PM EDT.