It’s the day before Halloween, but Space Sci Rev (vol. 221) makes it feel like Christmas:
Horányi, M. Tucker, S. Sternovsky, Z. et al. Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX) Onboard
NASA’s Interstellar Mapping And Acceleration Probe (IMAP) art. 102 s11214-025-01230-1
Wang, Y. Zhang, G. Gao, M. et al. The Progress of Small Celestial Bodies Sampling Robots art. 101 s11214-025-01231-0
The job of IMAP, just launched in September, is to put decimal places on the heliosphere and interplanetary medium, which implies studying the surrounding interstellar medium. Most of the IMAP instruments are then fields and plasma… except IDEX. The IDEX experiment will catch dust particles entering our Solar System from surrounding space. But it’s impossible to do just this. IDEX will, by chance, collect Solar System dust, from comets, asteroids, and for all we know Mercury, Deimos, etc.
Wang et al., by comparison, goes to asteroids (and to a lesser extent comets) directly and solidly. The paper lays out, in detail, our current state of the art in sample return from these small bodies. As with Horányi et al., when I say “in detail” I mean it: Space Sci Rev papers are long, technical, and detailed, often with hi-res graphics.
Should you choose to read both papers- and maybe the general IMAP paper (McComas et al. 2025), also posted- better not have big Halloween plans.