IDEX Instrument Developed to Collect Stardust as Part of NASA’s IMAP Mission

Scientists and engineers at the University of Colorado at Boulder will soon participate to capture a bit of stardust from space.

Collecting Bits of Matter in Space

Engineers at NASA have completed a significant milestone by developing the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft. It has transitioned from development and design to the assembly, testing, and integration phase. Set to launch in 2025, the spacecraft will attempt to answer two major questions in Heliophysics: the acceleration of energetic particles and the interaction of the Sun's solar wind with charged particles from outside the Solar System.

Led by Princeton University, IMAP will use ten different instruments as its spinning observatory operates in a Lissajous orbit about the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1 (L1) in a one-million-mile (1.6 million kilometers) journey. One of these instruments has been developed by a research team from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder.

The instrument, known as the Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX), is a large device shaped like a drum and weighs 47 pounds (21 kilograms). Last week, it was carefully loaded onto a delivery truck to be transported to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. The engineers will begin installing IDEX onto the IMAP spacecraft in this facility.

IDEX is expected to detect and analyze the composition of hundreds of interstellar dust particles for two years. It is also set to see thousands of interplanetary dust particles shed from asteroids and comets.

IDEX will open its 20-inch (51 centimeters) wide aperture during the mission to capture dust zooming by, just like a humpback whale that scoops up krill. Since interstellar dust particles are so rare, the experts need to ensure they can catch as many particles as possible. As these grains crash into the rear part of IDEX, they will instantly vaporize into a cluster of ions, which the instrument will then collect and analyze.

What is an Interstellar Dust Particle?

Interstellar dust particles refer to small solid particles that flow into the Solar System from the vast expanses of space between stars, known as the interstellar medium. These grains are distributed so thin that the instrument may only gather a few hundred during its lifetime. Nevertheless, each speck of interstellar dust holds a treasure trove of valuable information.

Interstellar dust particles were born in supernova explosions and were mostly altered while traveling in interstellar space. According to IDEX principal investigator Mihály Horányi, they are still the closest material we have for understanding the original building blocks of the Solar System. Because of this, it is important to detect and analyze them in space as they open a new window to the universe.

However, trapping dust in space is not an easy task. Each grain of dust only measures a few millionths of an inch wide, and some travel over 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) per hour.