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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The rocket’s payload includes NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, which will monitor ultraviolet light from the Earth’s geocorona.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Follow On Lagrange spacecraft also will launch into space aboard the Falcon 9 rocket.<\/p>\n
The NOAA’s SWFO-L1 satellite will monitor the sun for significant space weather activity.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Solar storms and other space weather can knock out satellites and affect power grids and other systems on Earth, Wallace added.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n