image: SwRI developed the CoDICE instrument for IMAP with a unique thermal management design to address extreme temperature variations ranging from the intense heat of direct sunlight to the frigid cold of deep space. To maintain operational reliability and longevity, the half of CoDICE that will always face the Sun has a shiny “gold” surface to deflect heat energy, while the opposite side has a matte black surface to absorb as much heat as possible.
Credit: Southwest Research Institute
SAN ANTONIO — September 22, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is managing the payload of instruments aboard NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft scheduled to launch Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. EST from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The payload, including the SwRI-developed Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) instrument, will study the interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium that surrounds it.
SwRI is playing a major role with the IMAP mission, managing the payload office and providing a scientific instrument and other critical technology. SwRI Space Science Division Executive Director Susan Pope is the mission’s payload manager, and Institute Scientist Dr. Mark Tapley is the payload systems engineer. SwRI managed the development and delivery of all 10 IMAP instruments from multiple institutions aboard IMAP.
“IMAP features the next generation of instruments,” said Pope. “At the heart of the IMAP mission is making sure that the science and technology is set up to achieve all of our goals through the coordinated measurements that we will be conducting.”
IMAP has been described as a modern-day celestial cartographer that will fill in blank spots on the map of the heliosphere. A major focus for IMAP is to explore the boundaries of the heliosphere — the space filled with plasma from the Sun that envelops all the planets of our solar system. Here, the outpouring of solar material collides with the local interstellar medium that fills the space surrounding the heliosphere. This interaction forms a critical barrier for high-energy cosmic rays at a distance of about 10 billion miles from the Sun. IMAP will also examine the fundamental processes that accelerate particles throughout the heliosphere and beyond.
The resulting energetic particles and cosmic rays can harm astronauts and space-based technologies.
The Institute developed the novel CoDICE instrument, which combines the capabilities of multiple instruments into one patented sensor. Initially developed through SwRI internal funding, CoDICE will measure the distribution and composition of interstellar pickup ions, particles that make it through the “heliospheric” filter. It will also characterize solar wind ions as well as the mass and composition of highly energized solar particles associated with flares and coronal mass ejections.
“CoDICE is about the size of a 5-gallon paint bucket, weighing about 22 pounds, and has a unique and beautiful thermal management design,” said SwRI’s Dr. Mihir Desai, an IMAP co-investigator and part of the CoDICE leadership team.
SwRI is a key member of the teams for the IMAP-Hi and IMAP-Lo instruments, responsible for developing the IMAP-Hi detector and IMAP-Lo’s conversion subsystem. The IMAP-Lo is a single-pixel ENA (energetic neutral atom) imager that measures interstellar neutral atoms in the lower energy range. Together with the IMAP-Hi, which measures these same types of atoms in a higher energy range, they will be able to provide a much wider and more in-depth view of interstellar space than we are currently capable of seeing.
SwRI built high-voltage power supplies for the Solar Wind Electron (SWE) instrument, which measures the distribution of thermal electrons in the solar wind, and the Global Solar Wind Structure (GLOWS) instrument, a non-imaging photometer that will observe the solar wind’s structure. SwRI also provided digital electronics for four other IMAP instruments.
IMAP will join a fleet of NASA heliophysics missions that seek to understand how the Sun affects the space environment near Earth and across the solar system.
Princeton University professor David J. McComas leads the mission with an international team of 27 affiliated institutions. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland built the spacecraft and will operate the mission. IMAP is the fifth mission in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP) Program portfolio. The Explorers and Heliophysics Project Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the STP Program for the agency’s Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/markets/earth-space/space-research-technology/space-science/heliophysics.