HelioSwarm: UK community meeting, Friday 4 November 2022, Burlington House, London

Launching in 2029, HelioSwarm is a NASA mission that will transform our understanding of the physics of space plasma turbulence. Flying nine spacecraft in formation into the solar wind and magnetosphere, HelioSwarm will for the first time provide the simultaneous multi-point, multi-scale measurements that are required to disentangle the spatial and temporal variations in collisionless plasmas that connect fluid-scale turbulence with ion-scale heating. Such processes are central to the heating and acceleration of the solar wind but also occur in astrophysical plasmas throughout the Universe; they also play a central role in terrestrial plasmas such as those in fusion devices. With a 15-61 Re orbit, HelioSwarm will also provide vital new information on many magnetospheric processes.

With the UK providing key instrumentation, and science team members from Oxford, Cambridge, UCL/MSSL and Imperial College, HelioSwarm represents an opportunity for a broad UK science community over the next decade.

We are holding a meeting to introduce the science and configuration of the mission, with presentations from NASA, the mission lead and all instrument teams. We are also keen to have a discussion of the wider science impact of HelioSwarm and what, as a community, we can do to best prepare for, and exploit, the mission. We therefore also invite in-person contributions from the entire UK science community, including theory and modelling, over all scientific areas which are relevant to HelioSwarm.

The meeting will be held on Friday the 4th of November 2022, at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House, London starting at 10:30am and finishing at 4:30pm. There is no charge for attending the meeting and we encourage people from all career stages to attend. It will also be streamed online but we encourage contributions in person rather than remotely.

Please register in advance for the meeting, whether you wish to contribute or just attend, by filling in the form at https://forms.office.com/r/JXGpEGQHBw . If you would like to contribute a presentation, please register by Friday 14 October.

Tim Horbury, Alex Schekochihin, Chris Reynolds, Jonathan Eastwood, Daniel Verscharen, Colin Forsyth, Chris Owen