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.
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.
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.
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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 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.