We gratefully thank everyone who helped make the ISʘIS instrument suite and PSP mission possible. The PSP was designed, built, and is operated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) as part of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program (contract NNN06AA01C). Support from the LWS management and technical team has played a critical role in the success of the PSP mission. We acknowledge NASA PSP Guest Investigator grant (80NSSC21K1764). The modeling material is based upon work supported by NASA under awards number 80GSFC24M0006, 80NSSC21K0153, and ISFM work packages EIMM and Planetary Geodesy at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. We sincerely appreciate Carol Weaver’s ISʘIS SOC role in providing first-glance dust impact alerts and attitude kernels for simulations in coordination with the PSP mission operation center at APL.
Diverse Dust Populations in the Near-Sun Environment Characterized by PSP/ISʘIS
Creators
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1.
Princeton University
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2.
Goddard Space Flight Center
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3.
Catholic University of America
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4.
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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5.
California Institute of Technology
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6.
University of New Hampshire
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7.
University of California, Berkeley
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8.
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
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9.
University of Colorado Boulder
Abstract
The Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun energetic particle instrument suite on the Parker Solar Probe is dedicated to measuring energetic ions and electrons in the near-Sun environment. It includes a half-sky-viewing time-of-flight mass spectrometer (EPI-Lo) and five high-energy silicon solid-state detector-telescopes (EPI-Hi). To 2024 August, eight of EPI-Lo’s eighty separate telescope foils have experienced direct dust puncture events, most of which occurred inside 40 solar radii (0.19 au). These impacts represent the closest high-fidelity dust detections to the Sun. While there is limited information about the size/mass of each impact due to the lack of a dedicated dust instrument, we can determine the impact direction for six punctures, allowing us to partially constrain abundant dust populations in the inner zodiacal cloud. Remarkably, one of six unambiguous dust impactors was likely on a retrograde orbit, suggesting long-period cometary material may survive within 20 solar radii (0.09 au). We discuss observations in the context of highlighting multiple dust populations responsible for these events to improve our understanding of the zodiacal dust environment in the inner heliosphere (≲1 au).
Copyright and License
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
Contributions
Conceptualization—J.R.S., M.M.S. Formal analysis—M.M.S., J.R.S., P.P., D.M. Funding acquisition—J.R.S., P.P., D.M. Investigation— M.M.S., J.R.S. Methodology –J.R.S., M.M.S. Validation—M.M.S., J.R.S., P.P., M.E.H., J.G.M., D.M. Writing—original draft—M.M.S., J.G.M., J.R.S. Writing—review & editing—M.M.S., J.R.S., J.G.M., P.P., D.J M., D.M., C.M.S.C.
Data Availability
ISʘIS data and visualization tools are available at https://spacephysics.princeton.edu/missions-instruments/PSP; NASA Space Physics Data Facility (https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/); and ISʘIS science operation center (https://spp-isois.sr.unh.edu/home.html). The supplemental data in this study (M. Shen et al. 2024, Supporting Information data set) is publicly available on the Zenodo repository (doi:10.5281/zenodo.14548706).
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Additional details
Related works
- Featured in
- Journal Issue: https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/apj-230531-01 (URL)
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2412.18028 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.14548706 (DOI)
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NNN06AA01C
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC21K1764
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80GSFC24M0006
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC21K0153
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-03-17
- Available
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2025-05-08Published