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Researchers at CU Boulder will soon set their sights on the heliosphere, a massive bubble in space that surrounds our solar system and shields it from incoming radiation.听

NASA鈥檚 recently announced (IMAP) mission, which is slated to launch in 2024, will hover close to one million miles from Earth where it will observe the outermost edges of the solar system鈥攖he limits of our sun鈥檚 influence on space. 听

CU Boulder鈥檚 (LASP) will play a major role in the nearly $500 million mission by leading IMAP鈥檚 scientific operations and designing an instrument that will fly on the spacecraft, detecting tiny particles of dust that flow through space.听

Daniel Baker, director of LASP, said that the mission will provide new perspective on 鈥渙ur home in space.鈥�

鈥淭his is a wonderful demonstration of how LASP brings together solar science, planetary science, astrophysics and research on space weather,鈥� he said.听

Gigantic forces

It鈥檚 a diverse approach to a dynamic neighborhood. Baker explained that the sun continuously blasts out gusts of charged particles, known as solar winds. Like blowing a bubble gum bubble, these bursts expand through the solar system until they crash into similar winds moving in the other direction鈥攊n this case, from interstellar space. That crashing point marks the border of the heliosphere.

鈥淲e on Earth are awash between two gigantic forces,鈥� Baker said. 鈥淥ne is the constant flow of energy from the sun. The other is the bombardment from the galaxy beyond. We鈥檙e caught in the crossfire.鈥�

IMAP will explore this crossfire and, in particular, the charged particles and debris that manage to slip past that border in space. But the mission will look inward as well as outward, Baker said. As IMAP monitors the heliosphere, the satellite will also point a telescope back at Earth to record how solar winds smash into the planet鈥檚 magnetic field, potentially disrupting satellites and ground-based electronics.

鈥淚MAP will be in an ideal position to send real-time data to Earth to continue monitoring the energetic particles coming from the sun that can hit the Earth and cause significant space weather issues,鈥� Baker said.听

To support the mission, LASP will operate IMAP鈥檚 suite of 10 instruments, collecting the data they send back to Earth and disseminating that information to researchers worldwide. The institute has overseen similar operations for a number of NASA missions, including the (MMS) and (MAVEN) missions. Johns Hopkins University will manage the overall IMAP mission.

Interstellar dust

This satellite will also give scientists at CU Boulder the chance to peer at some of the galaxy鈥檚 smallest interstellar travelers: space dust particles. Mih谩ly Hor谩nyi, a professor in the Depatment of Physics, explained that researchers can learn a lot by studying the tiny particles that wash into our solar system from the Milky Way Galaxy. Similar specks of dust, for example, helped to seed all of the planets that now orbit the sun.听

鈥淓verything that your body is made up of, and everything in the solar system, came from gas and dust,鈥� said Hor谩nyi, who is also a research associate at LASP. 鈥淲e鈥檙e interested in how that dust was processed and how it continues to enter the solar system. The interstellar dust particles also play a critical role in shaping the composition of the atoms and ions of the inflowing interstellar gas.鈥�

To probe these questions, his team will install a dust detector a little bigger than a basketball hoop on IMAP. Called the Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX), the instrument will catch bits of matter that stream by the satellite, analyzing the atoms that make them up. And, Hor谩nyi said, the instrument can also record how fast those particles are moving and in what direction.

That data will allow the researchers to distinguish between dust that originated in our solar system鈥攕uch as from comets or from two asteroids smashing together鈥攁nd dust that came from farther away.听

In other words, dust can provide the IMAP team with another window into how our solar system interacts and swaps material with the galaxy at large.听

鈥淒ust provides a different way to look at the universe,鈥� Hor谩nyi said. 鈥淵ou can look with telescopes, or detect electrons, ions or neutral atoms, but you can also use bigger chunks of solid matter to learn about our galactic neighborhood.鈥�