Abstract

The history of ICPDP started in 1996 in Goa (India) as a response to growing interest in the topics of dusty plasmas, when the liquid and crystalline plasma was discovered. We continue a series of International Conferences on the Physics of Dusty Plasmas which take place every three years at different locations around the world (Goa, India 1996; Hakone, Japan 1999; Durban, South Africa 2002; Orleans, France 2005; Azores, Portugal 2008, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany 2011, New Delhi, India 2014, Prague, Czech Republic 2017). The conference provides a unique opportunity for disseminating the present status of dusty plasma physics worldwide and especially to young researchers. Ninth ICPDP conference is hosted by the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Science (IKI), Moscow, Russia. IKI acronym comes from Russian “Institut Kosmicheskih Issledovanyi”, which is Space Research Institute, and is used in English as is. IKI designs and builds scientific instruments for space experiments, acts as principal organization for various scientific space projects and missions, and uses the data of space probes to deepen our understanding of space and Earth. At present a significant topic of research at IKI is the space dust and dusty plasmas.