Here comes the sun: LANL designed instruments aboard NASA craft to study heliosphere, solar wind

Call it sun block.

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have developed two tools to learn more about the sun and the heliosphere, a protective layer produced by the sun that diverts harmful galactic rays away from the solar system. The Northern New Mexico laboratory developed two of the 10 instruments aboard a recently-launched National Aeronautics and Space Administration probe.

The instruments were mounted on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, which launched in September and is headed to the first Lagrange point, a gravitationally balanced spot in space located between the Earth and the sun. It takes about four months to reach the point, so by mid-January all the instruments should be operational and the scientific research phase of the journey will begin.