The 5th mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes Program, IMAP is a Princeton University led spacecraft, designed to investigate the heliosphere. The spacecraft carries a suite of 10 instruments, capable of measuring the interplanetary magnetic field (MAG), solar electromagnetic emission across a range of wavelengths (GLOWS), charged particles from both the Sun (HIT) and interstellar space (CoDICE, SWAPI), neutral atoms with a wide range of energies (IMAP-Lo, IMAP-Hi and IMAP-Ultra), solar wind electrons (SWE) and, finally, interstellar dust (IDEX). The mission is expected to launch in the second half of Sept. 2025.

The group's mission involvement is via Dr Jon Hillier's membership of the Science Team of the Interstellar Dust EXplorer IDEX instrument. This is a reflection-type impact ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometer, similar to the Destiny Dust Analyzer, designed to measure the composition, speed and mass of interstellar and interplanetary dust grains. The instrument is built and led by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. At Freie Universität Berlin, we will contribute to not only the interpretation and analysis of flight mass spectra, but also continue to provide a range of cosmic dust analogues for calibrating this, and other instruments, at the University of Colorado's Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT).