IMAP Media Day

Technicians inspect NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) spacecraft on a spacecraft dolly inside Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a NASA-hosted media day on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. IMAP and its two rideshares – NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) observatory – will orbit the Sun near Lagrange point 1, about one million miles from Earth, where IMAP will scan the heliosphere, a huge bubble created by the Sun’s wind that encapsulates our entire solar system, and analyze the composition of charged particles, and investigate how those particles move through the solar system.

Technicians inspect NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) spacecraft on a spacecraft dolly inside Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a NASA-hosted media day on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. IMAP and its two rideshares – NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) observatory – will orbit the Sun near Lagrange point 1, about one million miles from Earth, where IMAP will scan the heliosphere, a huge bubble created by the Sun’s wind that encapsulates our entire solar system, and analyze the composition of charged particles, and investigate how those particles move through the solar system.

Photographer NASA/KIm Shiflett
Album LSP_IMAP
Location Astrotech