MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

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

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.

RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting on Space Weather and the Solid Earth (March 2021)

The RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting “Space weather and the solid Earth: the hazard to technology at the Earth’s surface” is to be held remotely on Friday 12 March 2021 from 10.30–15.30. It will be convened by Juliane Hübert, Gemma Richardson, Neil Rogers, and Alan Thomson. Abstracts can be submitted here and should be submitted by the end of Friday 22 January 2021. To register, visit the RAS website for the meeting (free for Fellows and £5 for non-Fellows). The meeting will be held on Zoom.

 

The technological impacts of space weather at ground level are the result of space physics processes driven by solar activity and by geophysical processes both external and internal to the solid Earth. Space weather causes geomagnetically induced currents that can damage power transformers and safety systems. It enhances voltage differences in metal gas transmission pipelines, which increases corrosion rates in pipe steel. Large surface electric fields during space weather may also trip rail circuits. To tackle questions such as where, how big and for how long do impacts last, requires a multi-disciplinary approach. The NERC ‘Space Weather Impacts on Ground-based Systems’ (SWIGS) project therefore brought together a broad spectrum of scientific expertise to answer such questions. SWIGS reaches its end in 2021 and this discussion meeting is intended for the scientific community to take stock of what we have learned about space weather and its impacts at ground level, in the last few years, as well as to discuss the scientific and operational breakthroughs that are still required. Given recent UKRI support for development of operational space weather services in the UK, the timing of this meeting seems particularly appropriate, as we look to a next generation of space weather models and applications.

 

RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting on Comparative equatorial Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Magnetosphere coupling (February 2021)

The RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting “Comparative equatorial Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Magnetosphere coupling” is to be held remotely on Friday 12 February 2021 from 10.30–15.30. It will be convened by Tom Stallard, Greg Hunt, and Beatriz Sanchez-Cano. Abstracts can be submitted here and should be submitted by the end of Tuesday 12 January 2021. To register, visit the RAS website for the meeting (free for Fellows and £5 for non-Fellows). The meeting will be held on Zoom and Gather.town.

The main goal of this meeting is to bring a bridge between different planetary communities that would help to understand how equatorial magnetic fields link the atmosphere with the surrounding space environment across a range of planetary bodies, providing us with a comparative view of how these regions interact, the currents, and dynamics that these interactions produce; click through to read the abstract.

Read more: RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting on Comparative equatorial Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Magnetosphere...

RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting on Space Weather Energy Pathways and Implications for Impacts

The meeting will take place via Zoom and Gathertown on Friday 08 January 2021. The programme, including Gathertown links, can be downloaded here. The abstract book can be downloaded here.

Registration is now open, with a deadline of midnight Thursday 07 January 2021. Registration links and details are available on the meeting website here: https://ras.ac.uk/events-and-meetings/ras-meetings/space-weather-energy-pathways-and-implications-impacts.

For questions, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Solar Orbiter school in 2021

 

A school dedicated to Solar Orbiter is to be held at the Ecole de Physique des Houches, 6–9 April 2021.

The exploitation of the ESA Solar Orbiter mission will shape the activity of the international heliophysics community for the years to come. Its success will depend on our ability to combine in situ and remote sensing data. This school held in the French Alps, will provide training to young scientists in using the extremely various datasets and the tools specifically developed to analyze them. It targets an international audience primarily composed of PhD students and junior postdoctoral researchers.

It will provide short presentations of the mission instruments and first results, hands-on activities for data analyses, as well as sessions for presentation by students. The school is organised by the French community, but is open to everyone.

While we are still facing an on-going worldwide pandemic, the conference center may open but only to a very limited amount of participants. Furthermore, different situations from different locations in the world may mean that international travels will not be possible at the time the school will be held. Therefore, we will provide a live access to the online lectures/hands-on sessions/presentations as well. We will need interested participants (for both on-site and remote participants) to register online, to assess the interest in the community (note that registration for remote participation will be capped to allow proper online interactions).

While we monitor the situation, the current calendar is as follows: pre-registrations will open on 15 December 2020 on the school website and will close on 31 January 2021. Applicants will be notified in early March 2021 at the latest.

For more information about the program and updates visit the school website.

Virtual meeting on GOLD, ICON and COSMIC

The science teams of GOLD, ICON, and COSMIC, in conjunction with ground-based observers, will hold a workshop entitled Geospace discovery science in a new decade (GDS workshop) on 8–10 February 2021. Each day will comprise two separate sessions, each of which will last two hours, for a total of twelve hours of content. This is a follow-up to a meeting from 2016, and the summary text is below.

 

Three new space missions, COSMIC-2, GOLD and ICON, provide remarkable avenues for new investigations of the geospace system, in collaboration with a growing network of ground-based observatories and their associated research teams. With a broad slate of new capabilities, the geospace research community is presented with unprecedented opportunities for new research and a revitalised capacity for solving significant outstanding problems in near-Earth space weather. The two NASA missions, ICON and GOLD, observe the thermosphere and ionosphere using optical and in-situ instruments. The international COSMIC-2 mission comprises a constellation of six satellites that map the ionosphere using GPS radio occultation, in-situ measurements, and beacon signals for space to ground measurements. Enhanced ground-based observatories, cubesats, and other satellite constellations, also provide essential new measurements. Combining these tools to effectively address questions in ion-neutral coupling and upper-atmosphere dynamics requires a comprehensive scientific strategy for broad community participation. Therefore we are holding an online workshop from the 8-10 February 2021. This workshop will discuss the space-based missions, and complementary ground-based observations, modelling, and data synthesis.