16 January Andover AS: Space Weather from L5

[MarkRadice]

Happy new year! We are starting our New Year with another high-quality talk.  http://www.andoverastronomy.org.uk/ 

Dr Jackie Davies (Heliospheric Physics Group Leader, RAL Space, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) will be visiting.

She is an established space physicist, with over 25 years’ experience in ionospheric, magnetospheric, and heliospheric physics through extensive involvement in a range of major ground-based and space-borne science projects including EISCAT, SuperDARN, the ESA/NASA Cluster mission and NASA’s STEREO mission.

Jackie’s publication list comprises more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, over a diverse range of topics including natural and artificial heating of the high-latitude ionosphere, magnetic reconnection at the magnetopause and in the magnetotail, and, most recently, investigation of the evolution of both transient and background structures in the solar wind. The latter includes characterization of the morphological and kinematic properties of coronal mass ejections and stream/co-rotating interaction regions, based, in particular, on visible-light imagery from the STEREO/Heliospheric Imager (HI) instruments for which Jackie is the project scientist.

As well as being project scientist for STEREO/HI, Jackie also leads the Space weather Coronagraph for OPErations (SCOPE) project, an ESA-funded, RAL Space-led project to develop a compact solar coronagraph; moreover, Jackie leads an international consortium that is designing the suite of imaging instruments baselined for ESA’s Lagrange (L5) operational space weather monitoring mission, currently under development.

After a brief history of solar/heliospheric physics in RAL Space, Jackie will focus on the STEREO mission, including a discussion of the payload and selected results. She will then describe how the use of the STEREO data for real-time space weather monitoring has led to the development of Lagrange. Finally, Jackie will summarise some of the other recently-launched and upcoming solar/heliospheric physics missions, and describe RAL Space’s involvement therein.

After Jackie’s talk, Terry Tucker will give us a short presentation on his well-earned degree and explain the Astronomy / Cosmology that he studied.

After which, if it is clear, we will head outside for some observing. The forecast is for partially clear so fingers crossed (although I find it hard to believe given today’s weather!).