# SWFO-L1

*Spacecraft*

The first satellite built for space-weather forecasting rather than for research: it watches the solar wind and the coronal mass ejections coming out of it from a point between the Earth and the Sun, and the warnings go straight to the forecasters who tell power grids and airlines what is about to arrive. DSCOVR has been doing that job for a decade past its design life, and this is the replacement, flown with a spare decade of fuel of its own.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Agency | NOAA |
| Launched | 2025-09-24 - still working |
| From the Sun | 149,268,661 km (-39,933 km/d) |
| From the Earth | 1,576,134 km (+2,667 km/d) |
| A signal takes | 5 s |
| Travelling at | 29.3 km/s |

Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of 2026-09-05, changing at the rate given beside each. The interpolation itself is good to a few kilometres; what ages these figures is the date, not the arithmetic.

## Path

A third loop about L1, flown by a craft that arrived on the same rocket as IMAP and Carruthers. The three separated after launch and hold their own orbits about the point, but at the scale of this map they are one place: everything at L1 is within a few hundred thousand km of everything else there.

## Elsewhere

- On the live map: https://www.orbitalmap.space/?world=solar-system&focus=swfo-l1
- The mission's own page: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swfo-l1/
- This object as a page: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/swfo-l1/
- Every object: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/
- What this site is and what it reads: https://www.orbitalmap.space/llms.txt