Tim Horbury - The IMAP mission: overview and prospects for science and space weather

Описание: Speaker: Prof. Tim Horbury (Imperial College London)

Abstract:

IMAP, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, is a NASA mission due to launch in mid-2025 and enter the Sun-Earth L1 halo orbit three months later. IMAP will study energetic neutral atoms arriving from the distant heliosheath, studying how the solar wind interacts with the interstellar medium. It will also carry an in situ payload, including a magnetometer funded by the UK Space Agency and built at Imperial College London, focussed on the dynamics of pick-up ions and other minor ions and the acceleration of ions at interplanetary shocks.

NOAA’s SWFO-L1 mission will launch with IMAP; when both arrive at L1, there will be six missions (with ACE, Wind, DSCOVR and Aditya-L1) simultaneously measuring magnetic fields and plasma. This provides an unprecedented opportunity to perform multi-spacecraft studies of solar wind structures, the 3D structure of the plasma around the correlation scale, and spatial variability of shocks and particle acceleration. It will also make it possible, for example using Grad-Shravanov reconstructions, to estimate the spatial structure of the solar wind arriving at the Earth’s magnetosphere, improving our ability to study solar wind-magnetospheric coupling. All six of these missions will also provide real-time space weather monitoring data and this raises the possibility of making far better space weather forecasts than are currently done.

Thumbnail image credit: NASA/Princeton/Johns Hopkins APL/Josh Diaz