Two UNH Space Weather Instruments Blast Off Toward the Sun

After years in the making, two UNH space weather instruments have blasted off toward the sun to study its influence on our solar system and monitor space weather, which can impact satellite communications and power grids on Earth.

More than 50 UNH engineers, scientists, and students contributed to the design, build and testing of the instruments carried aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on September 24th, 2025. This is the first time that two UNH space instruments associated with two different missions have launched on one rocket. The data captured by these instruments will ultimately help to safeguard our technology as well as our human and robotic space explorers from harsh space weather conditions.

The UNH space instruments are part of NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission and NOAA's Space Weather Follow On - Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) mission. They will fulfill distinct but complementary purposes upon their January 2026 arrival at the Lagrange point 1, which is about halfway between the Earth and the sun and allows for an unobstructed view of the sun's corona - the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere - for a better view of the charged particles called the solar wind emanating from the corona that cause damaging space weather events.

"Our Space Science Center has a long history of partnering with NASA and NOAA to tackle some of the really big questions and challenges facing our society, and it's thoroughly exciting that our engineers, scientists and students continue to be so deeply involved in missions of this caliber," said Ruth Varner, interim director for the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space.

The IMAP mission will chart the boundary of the heliosphere, a magnetic bubble that shields the Earth from most of the solar wind and helps make our planet habitable. In addition, the spacecraft will sample and measure solar wind particles streaming outward from the sun as well as energetic particles streaming inward from the boundary of our solar system and beyond.

UNH's IMAP-Lo instrument is part of the IMAP mission. Nathan Schwadron, UNH professor of physics and astronomy, was the lead for the IMAP-Lo instrument and one of two deputy principal investigators for the IMAP mission.

Another mission aboard the same rocket, NOAA's SWFO-L1, is a first-of-its-kind, full-time operational space weather observatory. By keeping a watchful eye on the sun's activity and space conditions near Earth without interruption, SWFO-L1 will provide quicker and more accurate space weather forecasts than ever before and will give operators more advanced warnings so they can take early action to protect vital infrastructure, economic interests, and national security on Earth and in space, according to NOAA.

UNH professor emeritus Roy Torbert, who served as the PI from the Southwest Research Institute for the SWFO-L1 mission, led a team that developed a magnetometer that will measure how the Earth's magnetic field is impacted by the solar wind.

UNH has a long legacy of building magnetometers, both for in-space and underground deployments. The magnetometer for SWFO-L1 builds on the legacy of the UNH-led Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, which launched in 2015.

The SWFO-L1 spacecraft will be renamed SOLAR-1 after launch to serve as the first mission in the Space weather Observations at L1 to Advance Readiness (SOLAR) program. The SwRI/UNH team was also awarded the contract to build and deliver nearly identical magnetometer instruments for the second and third SOLAR missions, which are scheduled to launch in 2029 and 2032.