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Jonathan's Space Report
No. 850 draft.                                                    2025 Sep 16  Somerville, MA, USA
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ISS
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Expedition 73 continues.

IMAP launch
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NASA and SpaceX plan to launch a Falcon 9 on Sep 23 with three science missions heading to Sun-Earth Lagrange
Point L1.

The press kits for the three missions are horrifyigly devoid of quantitative information. In frustration
I have been driven to assemble the information I think SHOULD be trivially available in those press kits,
so here you go:

IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) is  mission 5 in the
NASA STP (Solar Terrestrial Probe) series; PI D. McComas (Princeton). It
was built and is operated by APL, and its mission is to study the flow
of the interstellar gas near the Earth using energetic neutral atom 
(ENA) imagers. IMAP is a cylinder 0.9m tall 2.4m dia plus a
magnetometer boom, length 2.5m (for total span 4.9m) with a launch mass
of about 900 kg wet including 144 kg of hydrazine for its 12 L3Harris MR-111G
hydrazine thrusters.  (Does anyone have a more accurate mass for IMAP?)

The instruments are:

IMAP-Lo (UNH) - a  low energy ENA imager with a 9 degree field of view (FOV), covering the 0.005-1 keV energy range.

IMAP-Hi (LANL and others) - a  pair of high energy ENA imagers covering the 0.4-15.6 keV range, scanning the ecliptic plane and poles

IMAP-Ultra (APL) - a  pair of high energy ENA imagers covering the 3-300 keV range, with 2 deg angular resolution

MAG (Imperial College) - a vector triaxial fluxgate magnetometer, with 500nT range.

SWAPI (Princeton) - the Solar Wind and Pickup Ions instrument to study H and He ions in the 0.1 to 20 keV/q energy range

HIT (GSFC) -High Energy Ion Telescope,  ion and electron energetic particle spectrometer,  energy range 2-40 MeV/nuc.

GLOWS (CBK PAN, Poland) - Global Solar Wind Structure, map heliospheric resonant backscatter glow of H Lyman-alpha 1216A and He 584A.

SWE (LANL)  Solar Wind Electrons -  3D distribution of thermal and suprathermal e-, 1 eV-5 keV.

CoDICE (SwRI) Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment,  mass/charge of ions. Electrostatic analyser with a TOF/E system to
measure 3D velocity distribution function, charge and mass of 0.5 to  80 keV/q ions (CoDICE-LO) and
energetic particle spectrometer (CoDICE-HI) for mass and direction of 0.03-5 MeV/nucleon ions and 20-600 keV e.

IDEX (CU-LASP)  Interstellar dust experiment; impact ionization / time of flight MCP detector to measure mass spectrum of component elements.
 

Carruthers Geocorona Observatory  is a NASA STP Mission of Opportunity, 
led by PI L. Waldrop (UIUC) and built by BAE Systems (former Ball). It
carries GCI (Geocoronal Imager). a set of ultraviolet imagers developed
by UC Berkeley to study hydrogen Lyman-alpha emission from the Earth's
exosphere, sensitive in approximately the 110-140 nm band.  Mass 240 kg
wet; propellant mass UNKNOWN; size 1.72 x 1.08 x 0.97m . The GCI consists of the NFI (Narrow
Field Imager), with a 3.6 deg field of view imaging out to 7 Earth
radii, and the WFI (Wide Field Imager) with an 18 degree field of view
out to 30 Earth radii.

I haven't managed to find any information about the propulsion system on Carruthers.


SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On - L1) is a NOAA-NESDIS space weather 
observatory built by BAE Systems/Boulder using the Evolve bus. Mass is
377 kg wet 304 kg dry. Size is roughly 1.5 x 1.5 x 2.0m with a 5.6m long
magnetometer boom. The spacecraft has 4 x 5N hydrazine thrusters.
SWFO-L1 will be placed in a 300000 x 215000 km SEL1 Lissajous orbit.

Its instruments are:

CCOR-2 (NRL) Compact Coronagraph, imaging 3.5 to 26 solar radii with 65
arcsec resolution and a 4 Mpix camera sensitive in the  470-740 nm band.

SWIPS (SwRI), Solar Wind Plasma Sensor, electrostatic analysers for
velocity, density, temperature of low energy ions, 0.2-32 keV/e,  and
protons at 180-2500 km/s. 

STIS (Berkeley), Suprathermal Ion Sensor,
measuring 25 keV - 6 MeV high energy ions 

MAG (UNH/SwRI/), a fluxgate magnetometer measuring 64 mag field vectors per second.

The three spacecraft will be launched no earlier than 1532 UTC Sep 23 on Falcon 9 B1096.2 from Kennedy Space Center pad 39A.
The Falcon 9 first stage will land on the JRTI droneship. The second stage will reach a low parking orbit
and then reignite to enter a 200 x 1170000 km x 28.4 deg Lagrange transfer orbit 1h 13m after launch. IMAP will separate
at T+1:23:51; SWFO-L1 at T+1:30:26; Carruthers at T+1:36:46. The second stage will probably make
a disposal burn to heliocentric orbit, whose parameters are not currently public but I'll be harrassing
the SpaceX folks to fix that after the launch, unless the asteroid astronomers spot it for us.


Table of Recent Orbital (and near-Orbital) Launches
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Date UT       Name			          Launch Vehicle	 Site		 Mission  INTL.  Catalog  Perigee Apogee  Incl	 Notes

Sep 12 0156   Nusantara Lima                           Falcon 9           Canaveral LC40   Comms   205A 249 x 15729 x 26.5
Sep 13 0210   Kosmos-2595 (Glonass)                    Soyuz-2-1b/Fregat  Plesetsk LC43/3  Nav     206B 19136 x 19156 x 64.8
              Kosmos-2596 (Mozhaets-6)                                                     Nav     206A
Sep 13 1755   Starlink Group 17-10                     Falcon 9           Vandenberg SLC4E Comms   207  255 x 269 x 97.6
Sep 14 2211   Cygnus NG-23                             Falcon 9           Canaveral LC40   Cargo   208A 242 x 245 x 51.6
Sep 16 0106   WHJSW 07-01 to 07-04?                    Chang Zheng 2C/YZ-1S Jiuquan        Comms   209  807 x 811 x 50.0

Table of Recent Suborbital Launches
-----------------------------------

Aug 28 0243   TOMEX+ 41.123CE   Terrier Imp.Orion   Wallops LA2 ARC      Atmospheric     154?    Atlantic
Aug 28 0244   TOMEX+ 41.124CE   Terrier Imp.Orion   Wallops LA2 MRL      Atmospheric     154?    Atlantic
Aug 28 0248   TOMEX+ 36.335CE   Black Brant 9       Wallops LA2 50K      Atmospheric     135?    Atlantic


.-------------------------------------------------------------------------.
|  Jonathan McDowell                 |                                    |
|  Somerville MA 02143               |  inter : planet4589 at gmail       |
|  USA                               |  twitter: @planet4589              |
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