The annual UK solar missions forum was held at the RAS on the 11th January. These are annual meetings to update the community on space missions, ground-based facilities in order to encourage involvement and to inform people of upcoming future possibilities. Many thanks to all those who attended and presented – it was a successful meeting, with plenty of discussion. Talks were presented by a number of groups on major upcoming projects currently in development, on operational missions, on the planning for future mission opportunities and high-performance computing and wider strategic issues. It was good to see attendance from some students as well. The talks will be added to the mission forum website in the next week or so everyone can catch up if you didn’t get to attend. The talks from the previous meetings are there as well.
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~lkh/UKsolarmissions/meetings.html
A few specific actions from the community came up:
- DKIST (dkist.nso.edu) – if people want to get involved with developing user cases, please get accounts on JIRA and join in – see Lyndsay’s talk. We will look into having a UK workshop to focus on observing with DKIST in 2019. This timing will allow lessons to be learnt from the NSO workshops that are currently underway.
- Solar Orbiter – there is still some STFC funding available for people to attend SO meetings. If anyone wants assistance with travel funds please contact Louise. The Modelling and data analysis working group (MADAWG) is the obvious one that would be of most interest to people.
- A solar-C proposal is being submitted to JAXA at the end of January. The outcome will be in the summer. Once this is known, an update will be given (Louise will send it to UKSP) and coordination to obtain UK and ESA funding will begin in earnest.
- HPC issues were highlighted by Alan. Dirac resources assigned to solar physics cannot meet the demand.
- A coordinated approach could be taken to pull together data analysis and visualisation (such as that shown by Aaron), with simulations, and big data (Lyndsay, Mihalis, Louise, Alan, others? Should discuss).
- The next solar missions forum was agreed to be at the same time of year back to back with a solar RAS discussion meeting. Louise to coordinate that with Mark Lester.
- There was a discussion on having another UK Solar Orbiter working group meeting – the last one was in 2016. The purpose would be to ensure the community was up to speed on the instrument capabilities and observing, and how to optimise the science. If any group wishes to hold such a meeting please contact Louise. A reasonable timeline would be in 2019.
- On the Solar Orbiter theme, the community is encouraged to look at the Science Activity Plan https://issues.cosmos.esa.int/solarorbiterwiki/display/SOSP/SAP-related+work
If there are any missing areas, then feel free to contribute.
STFC is currently running a consultation exercise to reassess the Science Challenges that underpin the organisation. We encourage people to participate in this by answering the questions below. Issues we discussed at the forum can be addressed by answering the questions below – and this deadline is urgent! SSAP would appreciate comments from the UKSP community, in particular concerning the following two questions:
1. Do the current science challenges continue to reflect STFC’s science goals for the next 10 – 20 years, and if not, what changes are needed?
2. What refinements could be made to the description of science challenges to make them clearer/draw out the excitement of the research?
Please send your feedback by email to Huw Morgan, chair of the solar system advisory panel, hmorgan@aber.ac.uk before January 22.