SpaceX just sent three space weather probes to the final frontier.
According to Space, Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, September 24, at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT), carrying NASA's IMAP mission and and two other spacecraft.
Each probe has its own objectives, but all three will work toward the same larger goal: help scientists better understand space weather and its effects on Earth.
They're also all headed to the same place — the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, in the direction of our star.
IMAP (short for "Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe") is the primary payload on today's flight. The roughly $600 million spacecraft carries 10 different science instruments, which it will use to monitor solar activity as well as study interstellar dust and the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing continuously from our sun.
The mission's data will also help scientists map the outer boundary of the heliosphere, the vast bubble around our solar system that's dominated by the sun's solar wind and magnetic field.
