IMAP Media Day

One of two rideshare spacecraft on NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) observatory sits on a spacecraft dolly in a high bay inside Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a NASA-hosted media day on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. The missions, along with NASA’s exosphere-studying Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, will orbit the Sun near Lagrange point 1, about one million miles from Earth, where SWFO-L1 will monitor the Sun and near-Earth environment using a suite of instruments that provide real-time measurements of solar activity.