In May next year, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to capture minuscule dust particles streaming into our solar system from interstellar space, in hopes of studying the very building blocks of our cosmic backyard.
The primary goal of the mission, called the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), is to study the huge, sun-created bubble known as the heliosphere that surrounds our solar system. The heliosphere shields Earth and other planets from cosmic radiation entering our solar system from the outside.
