Space Showdown: 48 Hours of Epic Launches, Cosmic Breakthroughs, and a New Moonship Name
Major Launches Light Up Late September Solar sentinel liftoff: The week’s biggest blast-off came early on Sept. 24, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared off Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center carrying a trio of spacecraft devoted to space weather research nasa.gov. In a single launch at 7:30 a.m. EDT, NASA and NOAA deployed the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On L1 (SWFO-L1) satellite toward the Sun-Earth Lagrange point nasa.gov nasaspaceflight.com. This “fleet” will probe how the Sun’s charged particles and solar wind affect Earth and the broader solar system. “This