Meet IMAP. This week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the

human adventure across our solar system and beyond. A vast and invisible bubble

surrounds our sun and planets, shielding us from much of the radiation that fills the galaxy.

It's called the heliosphere, and for decades, we've only had a rough understanding of what it looks

like, how it moves, and how it protects us. Now, a new mission is helping to

change that. NASA's interstellar mapping and acceleration probe, or IMAP, is a space mission

designed to map the outer boundary of the heliosphere and study how particles are energized as our

sun interacts with interstellar space, all from a vantage point that's about a million miles from Earth.

This week I'm joined by David McComis, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University,

and Principal Investigator of NASA's IMAP and IBEX missions, along with Matina Guleidu,

a heliophysicist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory,

former IMAP Ultra Instrument lead, and current IMAP project scientist and co-investigator.

Together, we'll talk about how IMAP uses its 10 instruments to turn tiny particles into a global picture of our solar system's protective shield.

After the interview, we'll check in with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist for What's Up.

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On September 24, 2025, NASA launched a new mission designed to map one of the most important and least visible features of our solar system.

The interstellar mapping and acceleration probe, or IMAP, is now stationed about a million miles from Earth at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange Point, where it can maintain a constant, uninterrupted view of the space shaped by our sun.

From this vantage point, IMAP studies the heliosphere. That's the enormous bubble inflated by the solar wind that surrounds our entire solar system

and helps shield us from high energy radiation coming in from the rest of the galaxy.

Mapping something this vast and invisible requires a clever trick, though.

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