The award is for myself and 3 Co-I's (located at APL, SwRI, and University of Alabama Huntsville) to investigate the 'seed' particles, also called suprathermal particles. Seed particles are the particles that are accelerated most efficiently in shocks. When coronal mass ejections come off the sun they are often accompanied by shocks, and these shocks pick up the particles hanging around in the near-Sun environment and accelerate them up to high energies. It's not just coronal mass ejections that accelerate particles but other solar wind interaction mechanisms, such as stream interaction regions too.