Interplanetary Monitoring Platform
Interplanetary Monitoring Platform was a program managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as part of the Explorers program, with the primary objectives of investigation of interplanetary space, interplanetary plasma (physics), plasma and the interplanetary magnetic field. The orbiting of IMP satellites in a variety of interplanetary and earth orbits allowed study of spatial and temporal relationships of geophysical and interplanetary phenomena simultaneously by several other NASA satellites. Satellites Technology The IMP program was the first space program to use integrated circuit (IC) chips, which it first launched into space with the IMP-A (Explorer 18) in 1963. This predates the use of IC chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer, used for the Apollo program. The MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor) was adopted by NASA for the IMP program in 1964. The use of MOSFETs was a major step forward in spacec ...
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