The imminent launch of NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe mission (IMAP, launching 2025) mission opens a novel observational window into how particle acceleration operates in the inner heliosphere and solar wind environment near-Earth as well as the connections between solar and solar wind variability and the outer heliosphere plus mechanisms mediating the interaction between the heliosphere and the local interstellar medium. The IMAP observatory will operate in orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 point (1st Lagrange point), where it will also serve as a new space weather monitor. The spacecraft carries a suite of 10 instruments, some devoted to in-situ investigations of the near-Earth environment (thermal plasma, pickup ions, energetic particles, magnetic field, interplanetary and interstellar dust), some devoted to remote sensing of the outer heliosphere and interstellar medium (interstellar neutrals, Lyman-alpha helioglow, and a comprehensive range of energetic neutral atoms, ENAs).
IMAP is a project that brings together 25 partner institutions, and has the ambition of bringing together scientific communities addressing particle acceleration, both in the inner and outer heliosphere, and connections between the inner and outer heliosphere and the interstellar medium, from which we welcome abstracts to this session.
We invite and solicit submissions focused on the themes of particle acceleration and related processes in the inner/outer heliosphere, samples of interstellar material, and outer heliospheric and/or interstellar processes inferred by ENA and/or in-situ observations. Contributions involving theoretical and numerical modelling, as well as input from current and past missions, are welcome.