Clone of Solar Orbiter

We held the first UK Solar Orbiter working group on Friday 23rd September 2016 at the RAS. This was well attended with a packed room. We had introductions on the mission and instruments from members of the ESA science and operations teams, followed by 2 invited 10 mins talks on each of the 4 major science goals of the mission which led into fruitful discussion time for each topic. A website with the talks linked has kindly been put together by David Long:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mssl/solar/UK-SolarOrbiter/first-discussion-mtg

This website will be expanded on in the future.

There was much lively discussion, and we concluded by debating the best way forward to continue significant future participation in mission preparations for the wider UK communities not directly involved in the hardware builds.

Travel funding

Tim/Louise/Chris/Andrzej have just received approval for some travel funding from STFC which is intended to help people outside of the hardware groups to attend key meetings over the next ~18 months. There are ESA working groups that we think the UK could contribute well to - two examples of these are the helioseismology working discussion in late October at MPSin Germany and the mission data analysis and modelling working group which is due to meet at the end of the year/start of next year.  For people interested in attending these meetings, we can aim to provide some travel support for these meetings.  Thus let us know as soon as you can if you are interested in these working groups. The data analysis and modelling group in particular is likely to be one of an ongoing series of meetings, so a commitment to the working group will be required.

Upcoming meetings

The next Solar Orbiter science meeting is in Granada in April next year (http://spg.iaa.es/solo2017/ ).  A good attendance from the UK would be excellent. Again it is likely we will be able to use the travel funds to fund a number of scientists to go and present work there - we believe we can cover the registration fee for about 10 people for this. We suggest that anyone interested sends us a few sentences on what they plan to present and we will select the top 10 most applicable to Solar Orbiter science. We strongly encourage PhD students to attend. Please send us your proposal for this meeting by the end of November to Louise (l.harra@ucl.ac.uk), who will collate the entries and, if necessary, undertake a selection exercise along with Tim, Chris and Andrzej.  Details of future workshops are on:

http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/solar-orbiter/meetings

Email list

Finally, an e-mail list has been setup - we will use this to send around information on upcoming meetings, so if you're interested in keeping in touch please sign up to the following:

send an e-mail to majordomo@majordomo.mssl.ucl.ac.uk

have the subject header and message empty (including address footer) and then add in the message: subscribe uk-solar-orbiter

Acknowledgements

Many thanks for your contributions - especially to Yannis Zouganelis, Andrew Walsh, Dave Williams, David Burgess, Giulio Del Zanna, Mat Owens, Huw Morgan, Silvia Dalla, Eduard Kontar and Bill Chaplin for being the first willing and very clear speakers at this meetings. We plan to hold the next in a series of these meetings next year, perhaps with a focus on modelling/theory.

The 1st UK Solar Orbiter Science Discussion meeting was held on Friday 23rd September at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House. The meeting was a great success, and was attended by some of the ESA personnel involved with the Solar Orbiter mission, including the deputy project scientist and instrument operations scientists. 

The day started with some overview talks describing the goals, capabilities and limitations of Solar Orbiter. Subsequent talks were focussed on discussing the science that will be possible with Solar Orbiter. The sessions were divided up between speakers, with input from an in-situ and remote sensing specialist for each topic.

The talks given on the day are available here:

Mission Introduction and Overview

Mission Overview - Yannis Zouganelis (Solar Orbiter Deputy Project Scientist)

Payload Capabilities and Constraints - David Williams & Andrew Walsh (Instrument Operations Scientists)

Science Discussion

Solar Wind In-situ - David Burgess (QMUL)

Solar Wind Remote-sensing - Giulio Del Zanna (University of Cambridge)

Coronal Transients In-situ - Mat Owens (University of Reading)

Coronal Transients Remote Sensing - Huw Morgan (Aberystwyth)

Energetic particles In-situ - Silvia Dalla (UCLan)

Energetic particles Remote sensing - Eduard Kontar (University of Glasgow)

Helioseismology with Solar Orbiter - Bill Chaplin (University of Birmingham)

Organisation

The meeting was organised by the UK-based Instrument PIs;

Louise Harra (MSSL; EUI Co-PI), Chris Owen (MSSL; SWA PI), Tim Horbury (Imperial; MAG PI) and Andrzej Fludra (RAL; SPICE Co-PI)

Website maintained by David Long