Nasa Launches Three New Probes Dedicated to Space Weather
NASA on Wednesday launched three new space weather probes on a journey of over a million kilometres to study the Sun’s influence on Earth and its space environment.
A rocket carrying the trio lifted off at 07:30 a.m. Eastern U.S. time (11:30 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The agency confirmed that all three spacecraft were successfully deployed and are now en route to their destination: the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.
The probes include NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). Each will focus on different aspects of the solar wind and space weather.
Data collected will improve understanding of how the Sun impacts Earth, help protect satellites and space missions, and safeguard astronauts and aviation crews from adverse space weather effects.
