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Surrounding our solar system is a natural and enigmatic cosmic shield called the heliosphere — and a new mission has launched to help astronomers better understand it.

Created by the solar wind, a constant flow of charged particles that stream away from the sun, the heliosphere acts as an enormous bubble that protects the planets in our solar system from cosmic radiation permeating the Milky Way, our home galaxy.

In addition to Earth’s protective magnetic field, the heliosphere plays a major role in why life is possible on our planet — and how it perhaps once existed on others such as Mars.

Over half a dozen missions have contributed to how astronomers understand the heliosphere, and two enduring spacecraft, the Voyager probes, have collected key data after exiting the heliosphere to explore interstellar space.

But the new IMAP, or Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, mission is designed to investigate how the sun forms its solar wind, and how that solar wind interacts with interstellar space at the boundary of the heliosphere, which begins at a range three times the distance between Earth and Pluto, according to NASA.

This image shows NASA’s IMAP mission being loaded into the thermal vacuum chamber of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center’s X-Ray and Cryogenic Facility in Huntsville