A Rocket and a Star

A Rocket and a Star

On the morning of September 24, 2025, a rocket crosses the bright solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from Orlando, Florida. This image was captured about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space Center launch site. 

This rocket carried three new space weather missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all three—NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1)—as they begin their journey to L1, an Earth-Sun lagrange point. L1 is about 1.5 million kilometers in the sunward direction from planet Earth. Appropriately, major space weather influencers, aka dark sunspots in active regions across the Sun, are posing with the transiting rocket. In fact, large active region AR4225 is just right of the rocket's nose.

The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) will map the heliosphere—the invisible cosmic shield surrounding our solar system—and to answer some great unknowns about how particles accelerate in the solar wind.

Learn more about IMAP: 
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/imap/ 
https://imap.princeton.edu/

NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is a small satellite that will observe Earth’s outermost atmospheric layer, the exosphere. It will image the faint glow of ultraviolet light from this region, called the geocorona, to better understand how space weather impacts our planet.

The SWFO-L1 spacecraft will monitor space weather and detect solar storms in advance, serving as an early warning beacon for potentially disruptive space weather, helping safeguard Earth’s critical infrastructure and technological-dependent industries. The SWFO-L1 spacecraft is the first NOAA observatory designed specifically for and fully dedicated to continuous, operational space weather observations.

Image Credit & Copyright: Pascal Fouquet
Release Date: Sept. 27, 2025

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