An instrument created by a team at the University of New Hampshire was recently installed onto a spacecraft that is preparing for launch. Known as IMAP-Lo, the instrument could help us learn more about what’s beyond the boundaries of our solar system.
The spacecraft, known as IMAP, is part of the fifth mission in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program. Part of its purpose is to gather information about what makes up the gas and dust between star systems — what’s known as the “interstellar medium.”
Ten instruments will work together while the craft is orbiting the sun, observing and collecting components of the heliosphere — a bubble that extends from the sun and protects our solar system from harsh conditions in the space beyond it.
IMAP-Lo was built to collect and analyze invisible particles — neutral atoms — that make up the interstellar medium. Those are special because unlike charged particles, they don’t get pulled into magnetic fields, so they can meander through our solar system, and we can measure them on their own.
Nathan Schwadron, a University of New Hampshire physics professor who led the team that created the instrument, says the instrument is looking to fill a hole in scientific knowledge.
“We are interested scientifically in understanding our origin in the cosmos. And in order to do that, we need to actually detect the material that is outside of our solar system,” he said.
Schwadron says humans know a lot about the material on our planet; we’re learning about material on other planets; and we’ve taken lots of measurements of light from far-away stars. But we don’t know very much about the space just outside the boundaries of our own solar system.
“By detecting the region outside of our solar system, by detecting actual galactic matter, we can start to unravel a whole myriad of questions about our origins within the universe,” he said.
Learning more about that region can also shine light on how our solar system interacts with what’s beyond it to form the boundaries of our cosmic neighborhood, he said. Those boundaries protect the planets orbiting our sun from a hash radiation environment outside of the solar system.
Measuring galactic material will help scientists understand more about the age of the universe and the evolution of the galaxy. It could also help reveal where, exactly, we are in the universe.
“It turns out that there's a bunch of different ideas as to where that could be,” Schwadron said.
For many years, scientists believed we were located in something called the Local Interstellar Cloud. But now, it seems like we may be in a place where multiple interstellar clouds are interacting — and that could mean the future holds large variations in the boundaries of our solar system.
“We're really at the very, very tip of the iceberg of discovering what the conditions are within the portion of the universe that our sun and our solar system move through,” Schwadron said. “To me, it’s one of the most profound questions that we face, scientifically.”
IMAP-Lo will help separate different kinds of atoms it encounters, categorizing helium, hydrogen, deuterium, oxygen and neon — and maybe other atoms, too. Each of those particles can teach scientists different things.
Helium can help scientists detect the speed and direction at which we’re moving through space. Deuterium, which is left over from the Big Bang, can provide insight on the age of the universe. Oxygen can reveal how the interstellar medium is changing over time.
Schwadron said constructing IMAP-Lo was challenging: It relies on two different high-energy power supplies and is able to rotate to get a better view of space. But, he said, his team was passionate about furthering human knowledge of the universe.
“We need to be curious and ask hard questions and pursue those questions,” he said. “We're pulling off this whole mission because of all the people who are so dedicated to answering these questions.”
IMAP is scheduled to launch later this year. It will orbit the sun at a point one million miles closer than Earth. It will spin once every 15 seconds, its instruments looking into every part of the heliosphere and gathering information.
A livestream feed of spacecraft preparations can be found here.
