[SPA] SPA SECTION NEWSLETTER Volume XXVII, Issue 36

[Newsletter Editor]

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
SPA SECTION NEWSLETTER
Volume XXVII, Issue 36
Jun.16,2020

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Table of Contents

1. NASA LWS Town Hall Announcement for Input to FSTs for NASA ROSES 2021 and Beyond

2. SESSION: 2nd Interstellar Probe Session at the (Virtual) EPSC 2020 (Abstracts Due 24 June 13:00 CEST)

3. 2nd SCOSTEP/PRESTO Online Seminar (by Prof. Ilya Usoskin, July 20, 2020, 12-13 UT)

4. New RHESSI Science Nugget

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Announcement Submission Website: http://goo.gl/forms/qjcm4dDr4g


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NASA LWS Town Hall Announcement for Input to FSTs for NASA ROSES 2021 and Beyond

From: Anthea Coster (ajc at haystack.mit.edu)

The LPAG Executive Committee (EC) invites the Heliophysics community to participate in a virtual town hall concerning community input to the Focused Science Topics for ROSES 2021 and beyond.  This virtual town hall will be held at 1-2:30 ET, 12 – 1:30 CT, 10-11:30 PT this Thursday, June 18, 2020.  During the town hall, the LPAG EC will describe the community input process and conduct a Q&A session.

The WebEx information for joining the LPAG virtual town hall is now on the LWS Science Program website (http://lwstrt.gsfc.nasa.gov).

For further information contact:  Anthea Coster (ajc at haystack.mit.edu) or Sabrina Savage (sabrina.savage at nasa.gov)  


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SESSION: 2nd Interstellar Probe Session at the (Virtual) EPSC 2020 (Abstracts Due 24 June 13:00 CEST)

From: Elena Provornikova (Elena.Provornikova at jhuapl.edu)

For the second year in a row the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) is hosting a session on the science enabled by an Interstellar Probe to the Interstellar Medium and its implementation. Please consider submitting your work on the current state of understanding, outstanding science question, design concepts, enabling technologies, programmatic challenges and more. With the new efficient virtual format we look forward to another successful session this year. (Please see https://www.epsc2020.eu/virtual_meeting/overview.html for details.)

Session Link (including abstract submission): https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC2020/session/38421

Abstract Deadline: 13:00 CEST 24 June 2020

Session Title: Interstellar Probe: Pushing the Boundaries of Space Science

Session Description: The global nature of the interaction of our heliosphere and the Local Interstellar Medium (LISM) remains one of the most outstanding space physics problems of today. Voyager 1 and 2 are nearing their end of operations well inside of 200 AU and have uncovered a completely new regime of physical interactions. Anomalous Cosmic Rays (ACR) are not accelerated at the Termination Shock as anticipated, the force upholding the heliosheath against the LISM has eluded the in-situ measurements, significant shielding of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) appears in an extremely thin boundary layer at the Heliopause (HP), UV observations reveal a surprisingly dense wall of neutral hydrogen outside of the heliosphere, and the entire magnetic topology even well beyond the HP goes against all previous expectations. At the same time, IBEX and Cassini have obtained complementary “inside-out” ENA images of the heliospheric boundary region that cannot be fully explained.

An Interstellar Probe through the boundaries of the heliosphere, in to the LISM would be the first dedicated mission to venture into this largely unexplored frontier of space. With a dedicated suite of in-situ and remote-sensing instrumentation, such a probe would not only open the door for this new regime of space physics, but would also send us back the very first images from the outside of the global structure of the heliosphere that, in context with the in-situ measurements, would enable a quantum leap in understanding the global nature of our own habitable astrosphere. Traveling beyond the HP would offer the first sampling of the properties of the Local Interstellar Cloud and interstellar dust that are completely new scientific territories. As such, an Interstellar Probe would represent humanity’s first step in to the galaxy and become the furthest space exploration ever undertaken.

Relatively modest contributions from the Planetary Sciences and Astrophysics would offer historic science returns, including a flyby of one or two Kuiper Belt Objects, first insights in to the structure of the circum-solar dust disk, and the first measurements of the Extra-galactic Background Light beyond the obscuring Zodiacal cloud.
Although the idea of an Interstellar Probe has been discussed and studied since 1960, the lack of propulsion technologies and launch vehicles have presented a stumbling block to realize these concepts. With recent developments of conventional launch vehicle and kick stages, this bottleneck is being removed. Several international ongoing studies are developing realistic mission concepts using available or near-term technology, including the Pragmatic Interstellar Probe Study funded by NASA, the Interstellar Heliopause Probe project in Europe, and a study of dual probes to the boundaries of the Heliosphere under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

This session welcomes discussions on the current state of understanding and outstanding science questions that could be addressed by missions to the LISM, and reports on realistic design concepts, enabling technologies, and programmatic challenges.

On behalf of the conveners: Michel Blanc, Pontus Brandt, Pascale Ehrenfreund, Kathleen Mandt, Merav Opher, Robert F. Wimmer-Schweingruber, Olivier Witasse, Qiugang Zong


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2nd SCOSTEP/PRESTO Online Seminar (by Prof. Ilya Usoskin, July 20, 2020, 12-13 UT)

From: Ramon Lopez, Katja Matthes, Jie Zhang (relopez at uta.edu)

PRESTO (Predictability of the variable solar-terrestrial coupling) is the new SCOSTEP's 5-year program in 2020-2024.  Under the current difficult situation of having face-to-face meetings, SCOSTEP/PRESTO is conducting online seminar.  We are pleased to announce the 2nd SCOSTEP/PRESTO online seminar as below.  If you are interested, please register the seminar attendance and join the seminar on July 20, 2020 (Mon) 12-13 UT. 

Ramon Lopez (PRESTO chair) 
Katja Matthes and Jie Zhang (PRESTO co-chair)

Title: Extreme solar events: A new paradigm
Author: Ilya Usoskin
Affiliation: University of Oulu, Finland
Date/time: July 20 (Mon), 2020, 12:00-13:00 UT
Zoom Registration URL (pre-registration is necessary): 
https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fus02web.zoom.us%2Fwebinar%2Fregister%2FWN_1aFIAJm-RUCqmVg81Ouk9w&data=02%7C01%7Crelopez%40uta.edu%7C9bcb0827b4cd4675431208d80f6fde62%7C5cdc5b43d7be4caa8173729e3b0a62d9%7C0%7C0%7C637276320464446440&sdata=3zacqsX2YaYm12pahY%2B5ax73grDXL2edUGPDpzDquM4%3D&reserved=0

abstract: 
The Sun provides the energy for life on Earth and always shine in seemingly the same way, as was believed until recently. But we also know that it can produce sporadic eruptive events, such as solar bright flares and huge coronal mass ejections. Such events are often accompanied by the so-called solar particle storms, which are short-term events with very intense fluxes of solar energetic particles (SEPs) observed in space near Earth. These events remained beyond our detection abilities even several decades ago, but now we know that they may pose a serious threat to our modern technological society and even human lives outside the protective Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Our knowledge of such events was limited to nearly 70 years, with the strongest directly observed solar particle storm occurred on 23-Feb-1956 with a ~5000 % enhancement over the galactic cosmic-ray background. 

The following questions may arise: 
	Can even stronger storms appear? 
	How much stronger and how often? 
	What could be the "worst-case scenario''? 
	What consequences of such events would be for modern society?
The era of direct measurements is too short to answer these questions, but nature gives us a unique chance to get answers. Thanks to the recent discoveries, we know that there are extreme events on the Sun on the large-time scale and on distant sun-like stars. 

Here we present an overview of the current state of the art in the study of extreme SEP events based on different indirect methods, including cosmogenic isotope (14C, 10Be, 36Cl) in terrestrial archives and lunar rocks, as well as an extensive statistic of the superflares on sun-like stars.

This seminar will be recorded and opened later on the SCOSTEP Website at https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bc.edu%2Fscostep&data=02%7C01%7Crelopez%40uta.edu%7C9bcb0827b4cd4675431208d80f6fde62%7C5cdc5b43d7be4caa8173729e3b0a62d9%7C0%7C0%7C637276320464446440&sdata=rp22BpYlifXI7Raq4EAkGJf1WJcSU6KyXEjS8B5eo%2Bw%3D&reserved=0. 


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New RHESSI Science Nugget

From: Hugh Hudson (hugh.hudson at glasgow.ac.uk)

No. 380, "Energy transport by accelerated particles in the quiet solar atmosphere,” by Lars Frogner, Boris Gudiksen, and Helle Bakke. A first study of non-thermal particles integrated into an MHD simulation of the solar atmosphere. Click the title to read more.

We welcome contributions to the RHESSI Nuggets, and the topics may wander some distance away from specifically RHESSI results if they are generally interesting. See http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban/wiki/index.php/RHESSI_Science_Nuggets for these and others. Comments about specific flares can be found by searching for their SOLyyyy-mm-dd identifier from this home page.


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SPA Newsletter Editorial Team: Peter Chi (Editor), Guan Le (Co-Editor), Sharon Uy, Marjorie Sowmendran, and Kevin Addison

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