MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

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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.

Triennial Earth-Sun Summit 2021

The Triennial Earth-Sun Summit (TESS) is scheduled for 9–12 August 2021 Bellevue/Seattle, Washington, USA.

Once every three years, AAS, AAS/SPD, and AGU/SPA meet jointly to bring together the major subfields of the Sun-Earth connection: the Sun and its corona, the heliosphere, the magnetosphere, the thermosphere, the ionosphere, and related systems. The TESS meetings are a chance for specialists to step back and consider the system as a whole, stimulating cross-fertilisation and new insights. 

The TESS program is adaptable to the science community. In addition to invited plenary sessions, we solicit session proposals from the community for cross-cutting topics within the spirit of the TESS meetings. TESS sessions are oral sessions assigned in one or more 2-hour blocks, with 1-3 invited speakers and contributed talks; or panel discussions covering progress, current status, or future directions of a major cross-field subtopic of heliophysics. 

Session proposals have a deadline of 29 January 2021, and should include proposer names, a topic, a short précis describing why the topic is of interest, and some ideas for invited speakers or scene-setters. Proposers may (but are not required to) contact proposed invited speakers before submission.

The TESS submission forms are being finalized by the AAS/SPD and the URL will be announced by the end of this month in a follow-up to this note. TESS also supports workshops and/or town halls outside of the primary science program. These will be solicited when the session website goes online.

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

Autumn MIST schedule

Autumn MIST is being held on Gather and Zoom, 19–20 November 2020, is now available! 

The full schedule is available below, or you can click here to download and view a PDF. The links to the Zoom webinar, and the Gather rooms, are available through the MIST mailing list, along with a Google Drive folder containing all the posters in PDF format. If you are an attendee and do not subscribe to the MIST mailing list, you can subscribe.

The full list of abstracts can be downloaded here.

Read more: Autumn MIST schedule

NAM 2021 announced

The Royal Astronomical Society has announced that the 2021 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) will be held at University of Bath from Sunday 18 July to Friday 23 July 2021.

Proposals can be submitted for sessions to be held at NAM2021, and members of the MIST community are encouraged by the organisers to submit specialist and cross-disciplinary sessions. As well as hosting parallel sessions of varying duration, the conference will have space for collaborative meetings, half-day workshops and lunch sessions.

For more details on the meeting, and to submit a session proposal, visit the NAM2021 website. The deadline for submitting proposals for sessions is on Friday 8 January 2021 at 17:30 UTC.

Autumn MIST 2020

Autumn MIST will be held virtually this year on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 November 2020. The meeting will commence at 10:00 and run until 15:00 with breaks on both days, and will include poster and oral sessions.

Contributions are welcome from all areas of MIST science. We will not have a theme this year, and we would like to instead celebrate the broad variety of science in the MIST community. Abstracts should be submitted by completing the submission google form by the end of Friday 23 October.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. We look forward to seeing everyone at Autumn MIST!

NAM at the University of Bath postponed until 2021

The RAS have announced that NAM will be held at the University of Bath in July 2021, and a blog post on the University of Bath website goes into details on this. 

MIST will be present at NAM at University of Bath to help celebrate the Royal Astronomical Society's bicentennial, which will still be celebrated at Bath.

No plans to replace the 2020 NAM with a virtual presence have yet been announced, beyond the following excerpt from the blog post above.

There is no doubt that physical meetings will always play a part in the way scientists network and collaborate, but we are also eager to explore digital conference platforms, as we believe remote conferencing will be an important step forward in giving our participants dependable access to talks and meetings. Such virtual meetings hold great promise in making meetings both more inclusive and more environmentally sustainable. Inclusivity and reducing our carbon footprint are priorities for both the RAS and for the University of Bath.