Exploring the Interstellar Boundary with NASA’s New IMAP Mission

When launched in September 2025, IMAP, short for Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, embarks on a study of our heliosphere, a bubble-like region in space carved out by the solar wind and containing the Sun and all the planets.  The edge of the heliosphere, called the interstellar boundary, is where our solar system ends and the rest of the galaxy begins.  Despite being so far away, the interstellar boundary protects life on Earth by shielding us from the damaging radiation of galactic cosmic rays.  One of the reasons we want to study this region is so we better understand how it does this.  Come hear from Dr. Dan Reisenfeld, the Deputy Instrument Lead for the IMAP-Hi instrument built by Los Alamos National Laboratory, who will tell us what the interstellar boundary is, how the instruments he and his team have built can “see” it, and what happens in the early days of a new NASA mission.

Admission: $8/adult; $6/child; $20/family
Nature Center doors open at 6:45pm.
Planetarium events in general are not recommended for children under 5.

About the presenter:

Dan Reisenfeld first came to Los Alamos in 1998 to design space instrumentation for various NASA missions after receiving his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard. After 6 years at the Lab, he spent the next 14 years teaching physics and astronomy and continuing space research at the University of Montana. Missing the Land of Enchantment, he returned to Los Alamos in 2018, and is now building instrumentation for the NASA IMAP mission to explore the interstellar boundary, where the solar system ends and the rest of the galaxy begins.
 

Photo  Caption: Heliosphere Image Credit: NASA