Spacecraft · tracked live
IMAP
Maps the boundary where the solar wind runs out and interstellar space begins, by catching the neutral atoms that drift back in from it - the only way to picture the edge of the heliosphere from the inside. It sits between the Earth and the Sun and reports the solar wind in real time from there as well.
- Agency
- NASA
- Launched
- 2025-09-24 - still working
- From the Sun
- 147,712,124 km (-40,928 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 1,566,072 km (-1,850 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 5 s
- Travelling at
- 29.6 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A loop about L1, the same balance point DSCOVR keeps station at. The two are genuinely near neighbours - a hundred to two hundred thousand km apart at present, against the 1.5 million that separates either from the Earth - so this map draws them together because they are together.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.