From: Dave Williams drw@mssl.ucl.ac.uk

Meeting Announcement: “A New Generation of UK Space Exploration”

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Dear Colleagues,

At a successful and very lively UKSP/MIST Missions Forum at last month’s National Astronomy Meeting, attention was drawn to the fact that the picture for UK leadership in missions beyond the current round of Cosmic Vision was pretty blank. This means that beyond the projected end of Solar Orbiter and Swarm around 2029 “should these missions be selected” there are no space experiments planned to answer our questions about the heliosphere.

Two decades is a crucial figure in terms of mission development: it takes at least 15 years from concept through to launch, so now is the time when we need to start planning for our future in heliospheric physics, so that we can capitalise on our national expertise, influence scientific direction and train the next generation of scientists.

The schedule we face also has some urgency: ESA are expected to start soliciting ideas for the next round of Cosmic Vision, within the next 6 to 18 months, at which point we need our community to be ready to discuss our next mission concepts. Married to that, we also want to educate ourselves “especially the upcoming generations who will be the mission leaders of the future” on the processes involved in bringing a mission through from scientific concept to realising its launch.

So let’s start to address this challenge! There will be a meeting of the UKSP-MIST community, “A New Generation of UK Space Exploration”, on Wednesday 14th July (TBC), at the Royal Astronomical Society in Piccadilly, London. Strongly encouraging the participation of all interested groups across the UK, we invite you to bring along your ideas on mission concepts, unexplored areas in heliophysics, burning science questions and the observables you need to address them! We’ll also discuss the routes to proposing and developing missions, and a discussion on how we can best position ourselves for these future scientific opportunities.

To find out more, contact the organisers at:

heliophys.missions@gmail.com

Regards,
Dave Williams, Lucie Green, Colin Forsyth & Jim Wild.