Sept. 23 (UPI) — NASA officials are prepared to launch a mission that is designed to protect the Earth’s technologies against the potentially damaging effects of solar storms.
NASA and Space X officials have OK’d a Wednesday morning launch of the space agency’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe after weather scrubbed Tuesday’s launch.
The rocket’s payload includes NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, which will monitor ultraviolet light from the Earth’s geocorona.
The geocorona is a cloud of hydrogen atoms that extends the Earth’s atmosphere to the moon and beyond, according to the European Space Agency.
A National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Follow On Lagrange spacecraft also will launch into space aboard the Falcon 9 rocket.
The NOAA’s SWFO-L1 satellite will monitor the sun for significant space weather activity.
The IMAP mission will send a satellite into space that will act as a “buoy in space, a million miles from Earth that’s going to protect all of our technology here on Earth from the harmful effects of solar storms,” NOAA Director Clinton Wallace told WFOL.
Solar storms and other space weather can knock out satellites and affect power grids and other systems on Earth, Wallace added.
“It could even affect global positioning systems that our farmers rely on to plant crops, that pilots rely on to navigate across the globe,” he explained.
The IMAP probe has 10 scientific instruments that will enable it to map the sun’s heliosphere and study space weather, according to Spaceflight Now.
Scientists and engineers tested the probe at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., WZDX reported.
The mission is scheduled to launch at 7:30 a.m. EDT from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A along central Florida’s Atlantic coast.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster rocket will send the IMAP probe into space, along with two other spacecraft.
The local weather forecast calls for partly cloudy skies with a chance of thunderstorms and a high of 91 degrees on Wednesday, according to Accuweather.