MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

Latest articles

Latest news

RAS Awards

The Royal Astronomical Society announced their award recipients last week, and MIST Council would like to congratulate all that received an award. In particular, we would like to highlight the following members of the MIST Community, whose work has been recognised:
  • Professor Nick Achilleos (University College London) - Chapman Medal
  • Dr Oliver Allanson (University of Birmingham) - Fowler Award
  • Dr Ravindra Desai (University of Warwick) - Winton Award & RAS Higher Education Award
  • Professor Marina Galand (Imperial College London) - James Dungey Lecture
Full details can be found here: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/royal-astronomical-society-unveils-2023-award-winners.

New MIST Council 2021-

There have been some recent ingoings and outgoings at MIST Council - please see below our current composition!:

  • Oliver Allanson, Exeter (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024 -- Chair
  • Beatriz Sánchez-Cano, Leicester (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024
  • Mathew Owens, Reading (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023
  • Jasmine Sandhu, Northumbria (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023 -- Vice-Chair
  • Maria-Theresia Walach, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
  • Sarah Badman, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
    (co-opted in 2021 in lieu of outgoing councillor Greg Hunt)

Charter amendment and MIST Council elections open

Nominations for MIST Council open today and run through to 8 August 2021! Please feel free to put yourself forward for election – the voting will open shortly after the deadline and run through to the end of August. The positions available are:

  • 2 members of MIST Council
  • 1 student representative (pending the amendment below passing)

Please email nominations to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 8 August 2021. Thank you!

Charter amendment

We also move to amend the following articles of the MIST Charter as demonstrated below. Bold type indicates additions and struck text indicates deletions. Please respond to the email on the MIST mailing list before 8 August 2021 if you would like to object to the amendment; MIST Charter provides that it will pass if less than 10% of the mailing list opposes its passing. 

4.1  MIST council is the collective term for the officers of MIST and consists of six individuals and one student representative from the MIST community.

5.1 Members of MIST council serve terms of three years, except for the student representative who serves a term of one year.

5.2 Elections will be announced at the Spring MIST meeting and voting must begin within two months of the Spring MIST meeting. Two slots on MIST council will be open in a given normal election year, alongside the student representative.

5.10 Candidates for student representative must not have submitted their PhD thesis at the time that nominations close.

SSAP roadmap update

The STFC Solar System Advisory Panel (SSAP) is undertaking a review of the "Roadmap for Solar System Research", to be presented to STFC Science Board later this year. This is expected to be a substantial update of the Roadmap, as the last full review was carried out in 2012, with a light-touch update in 2015.

The current version of the SSAP Roadmap can be found here.

In carrying out this review, we will take into account changes in the international landscape, and advances in instrumentation, technology, theory, and modelling work. 

As such, we solicit your input and comments on the existing roadmap and any material we should consider in this revision. This consultation will close on Wednesday 14 July 2021 and SSAP will try to give a preliminary assessment of findings at NAM.

This consultation is seeking the view of all members of our community and we particularly encourage early career researchers to respond. Specifically, we invite:

Comments and input on the current "Roadmap for Solar System Research" via the survey by clicking here.

Short "white papers" on science investigations (including space missions, ground-based experimental facilities, or computing infrastructure) and impact and knowledge exchange (e.g. societal and community impact, technology development). Please use the pro-forma sent to the MIST mailing list and send your response to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Quo vadis interim board

 

A white paper called "Quo vadis, European space weather community" has been published in J. Space Weather Space Clim. which outlines plans for the creation of an organisation to represent the European space weather community.
Since it was published, an online event of the same name was organised on 17 March 2021. A “Quo Vadis Interim Board” was then set up, to establish a mechanism for this discussion, which will go on until June 21st.

The Interim Board is composed of volunteers from the community in Europe. Its role is to coordinate the efforts so that the space weather (and including space climate) European community can:

  1. Organise itself
  2. Elect people to represent them

To reach this goal, the Interim Board is inviting anyone interested in and outside Europe to join the “Quo Vadis European Space Weather Community ” discussion forum.

Eligible European Space Weather Community members should register to the “Electoral Census” to be able to vote in June for the final choice of organisation.

This effort will be achieved through different actions indicated on the Quo Vadis webpage and special Slack workspace.

MIST sessions at NAM

The forthcoming National Astronomy Meeting has a variety of sessions that have been proposed by members of the MIST community; the following is a list of the sessions that have been advertised on the MIST mailing list. (If you would like your session to appear below, please email MIST Council to be included.)

Open session on Magnetospheric, Ionospheric and Solar-Terrestrial physics (Oliver Allanson, John Coxon, Gregory Hunt, Mathew Owens, Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Maria-Theresia Walach)
We welcome contributions from all MIST disciplines discussing the latest results: from global system-scale dynamics and climatological timescales, down to gyroscale processes.

From plasma to galactic dynamics: collisionless physics across the Universe (Oliver Allanson, Thomas Neukirch, Chris Hamilton, Luca Franci, Jean-Baptiste Fouvry)
In this inter-disciplinary session we welcome all observational, theoretical and modelling work that considers the physics of collisionless systems – in either (or both of) the plasma and gravitational contexts. Invited speakers: David Burgess (Queen Mary University of London) & Benoit Famaey (Observatoire astronomique de Strasbourg).

Magnetospheres of the outer planets (Gregory Hunt, Jonathan Nichols, Joe Kinrade)
In this session, we invite presentations on any aspect of modelling or data analysis regarding the magnetospheres of the outer planets.

Observations of CMEs: from onset to impact (Teodora Mihailescu, Shannon Jones, Lucie Green, Mathew Owens)
We invite contributions which explore observations of CMEs: from high-resolution on disk images of CME onset, to heliospheric imagery and in situ measurements in the inner heliosphere, to create a coherent picture of a CME’s journey. We particularly welcome contributions which combine different types of remote sensing observations with plasma parameters measured in situ.

SMILE supporting science: magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling (Michaela Mooney, Maria-Theresia Walach, Jennifer Carter)
This session invites submissions concerning magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling using a combination of space and ground-based observations, or comparisons between space and ground-based observational datasets.

The solar wind from a new perspective with Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe (David Stansby, Lorenzo Matteini, Laura Berčič, Lloyd Woodham, Stephanie Yardley)
This session will focus on first results from Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe, including solar wind sources and connection science, heating and acceleration processes, turbulence and kinetic physics, as well as large-scale morphology. We welcome contributions from in-situ and remote sensing observations, modelling and theory.

Space weather and plasma processes: from the Sun to the Earth Karen Meyer, Sarah N Bentley, Marianna Korsos, Teo Bloch, Shaun Bloomfield, Richard Boynton, Tom Elsden, Richard Harrison, Paolo Pagano, Andy Smith)
We welcome presentations from the scale of individual processes to the coupling between physical systems, in the fields of solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric and ionospheric physics. We encourage contributions on a variety of research methodologies, including the application of techniques drawn from other disciplines, across observations, theory and modelling.

Wave-Particle Interactions in Space and Astrophysical Plasmas (Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Aurora Simionescu, Daniel Verscharen, Clare Watt, Emma Woodfield)
Wave-particle interactions are an essential process in plasmas across our solar system and in astrophysical bodies that governs plasma heating and the transfer of energy between particles and electromagnetic fields. This session aims to bring together researchers from the solar, terrestrial, planetary, and astrophysics communities to evaluate the breadth of interactions and the variation of their characteristics for different plasma regimes. Invited speakers include Wen Li (Boston University) and Francesco Valentini (Università della Calabria).

Waves and Oscillations in the Solar Atmosphere in the High-Resolution Era (Noemi Zsamberger, David Kuridze, Anne-Marie Broomhall, Robertus Erdelyi) The session will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and expertise in the field of solar atmospheric waves and oscillations, with a special focus on new theoretical, modelling and observational results obtained thanks to a variety of new instrumentation (such as SDO/AIA, Parker Solar Probe, SST, GREGOR and DKIST) with unprecedented high spatial, temporal and spectral resolution capabilities.