NASA announced Friday that it has awarded SpaceX a 10 109.4 million contract to launch its interteller mapping and cele acceleration probe (IMAP), along with four secondary payloads, on a mission to investigate the magnetic barrier surrounding its solar system.
The IMAP spacecraft will travel to Leverage Point 1 (L1) between Earth and the Sun, and from there will investigate the flow of particles from the Sun (“solar wind”) into outer space. After passing all the planets in the solar system, the solar wind will eventually collide with it, contained, and exclude competitive solar winds from other solar systems, creating a protective barrier around the solar system known as the “heliosphere”. This is the heliosphere that reduces the amount of cosmic radiation entering the solar system and eventually hits the earth.
Image source: NASA.
One of IMAP’s missions will be calculated precisely where this hellosphere is located. The second goal is to collect the incoming cosmic radiation and map it out through the heliosphere.
In addition to the IMAP, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will also carry NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer mission (a small satellite to get water to the moon), the National Ocean and the Atmospheric Administration’s space weather follow-Lag n la range ngreage 1 (early warning system detecting solar storms). , And the names of NASA’s other two heliophysics missions.
In 2018, NASA made the first estimate of the cost of building the IMAP spacecraft at 492 million, “excluding the cost of the launch vehicle.” In April, the government liability office estimated total mission costs With The launch vehicle can reach anywhere from 707.7 million to 776.3 million. Now that the cost of delivering the Falcon 9 reusable rocket SpaceX, which will take IMAP to L1, is known, it seems that the total cost of this mission has reached almost $ 601 million.
