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arXiv · 2608.25134

Capra: Scalable HEALPix-Native Intensity Reconstruction for High-Resolution IMAP Analyses

Nikola Bukowiecka·Daniel B. Reisenfeld·Maciej Bzowski
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Abstract

We present Capra, a HEALPix-native pipeline for reconstructing all-sky energetic neutral atom (ENA) intensity maps from the NASA Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration (IMAP) missions' event-counting data. Capra produces two products: (1) a baseline boresight-assigned map, and (2) an optional smoothed map on the HEALPix grid. This produces smooth, physically interpretable maps with consistent resolution changes and reference-frame transformations. The smoothed Capra maps recover the large-scale ENA morphology while reducing sampling-driven mottling and strip-like artifacts. Relative comparison with the Theseus reconstruction shows broadly consistent large-scale structure, with the discrepancies reflecting differences in reconstruction methods, rather than major morphological discrepancies. We verify invariance (preservation) of count numbers, rates, and intensities across tessellations under coordinate transformations, and demonstrate numerical convergence up to HEALPix resolution Nside = 64 for a representative dataset. We show that thread-based parallelism performance exhibits approximately linear strong scaling, with bounded memory usage, enabling efficient high-resolution reconstruction and making Capra well-suited for high-resolution IMAP reconstruction.

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Nikola Bukowiecka, Daniel B. Reisenfeld, Maciej Bzowski. 2026-08-25. Capra: Scalable HEALPix-Native Intensity Reconstruction for High-Resolution IMAP Analyses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25134

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