Heliophysics Town Hall Meeting 2008

NASA Heliophysics Town Hall Meeting
Planning Our Strategy for the Future
May 19-20, 2008

Holiday Inn College Park (I-95)
10000 Baltimore Avenue
College Park, MD 20740

Town Hall Meeting: Heliophysics Missions 2009-2034

NASA’s Heliophysics Division has begun the process of developing a Strategic Plan to chart the division's course over the coming decades. The input to this plan will in part derive from a strategic scientific research plan that will be assembled by a Mission Planning Working Group (MiPWG). The focus of the Division is to investigate the coupled Sun-Geospace system and the impact of solar variability on planets and the space environment. The previous Roadmap for the Heliophysics Theme (completed in 2006) and the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (completed in 2002) will be used as the basis for this update taking into account the developing US Space Exploration Policy (USSEP) and to reflect recent advances in our capabilities and understanding.

The Mission Planning Working Group (MiPWG) chair is Andrew B. Christensen, currently at The Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA, assisted by co-chairs James F. Spann, MSFC, Huntsville, AL, and O. Chris St. Cyr, GSFC, Greenbelt, MD.

Members of the MiPWG are: Alan C. Cummings (CalTech), Roderick A. Heelis (UT Dallas), Frank Hill (NSO), Thomas J. Immel (UC Berkeley), Justin C. Kasper (Harvard SAO), Lynn M. Kistler (UNH), Jeffrey R. Kuhn (U Hawaii), Geoffrey Reeves (LANL), Nathan A. Schwadron (BU), Stanley C. Solomon (NCAR), Robert J. Strangeway (UCLA), and Theodore D. Tarbell (Lockheed).

The Working Group requires input from the scientific community to develop this plan and invites you to participate in a Town Hall Meeting to be held at the Holiday Inn College Park (I-95), 10000 Baltimore Avenue, College Park, MD 20740 on May 19 and 20, 2008. The purpose of this two-day forum is to give all those interested in Heliophysics science the opportunity to provide direct input into the planning process.

The Town Hall Meeting will provide an opportunity to craft a realistic implementation strategy to help guide tactical decisions that will need to be made during the next few years. The meeting will continue the popular tradition of poster sessions for presentation of ingenious strategies, creative tactics, and innovative mission concepts. A special focus will be on the connected issues of launch vehicle availability and mission cost growth in a constrained budget environment.

The MiPWG is chartered in order to identify and prioritize the most effective heliophysics implementation strategy. This strategy will aid the community to solve the most relevant science problems of our discipline. Thus, the submission of innovative mission concept posters by the community is strongly encouraged by the MiPWG team. Besides being displayed at the Town Hall meeting, electronic versions (pdf) of the poster should be submitted to the team at the time of the meeting. The content and style of the mission concept poster for display at the meeting is up to the presenter and only limited by the dimensions of the poster board (4' x 4').

However, in order to support the strategic planning process and allow easy incorporation of community-provided content in the document, we strongly encourage presenters to submit an additional electronic version of their mission concept in a fixed, quad-chart style format. A link to the mission concept quad-chart template is provided here.

The following questions will be discussed in the Town Hall splinter sessions.
Splinter 1:
In your view, what is the most compelling and enabling science that will advance Heliophysics in the next 5-10 years? In the next 10-20 years?
Splinter 2:
Does the science that you envision fit into the current roadmap Research Focus Areas? If so, which one(s)? If not, could you suggest a new Research Focus Area that would include your new science? Are there any revisions to the Research Focus Areas that you would suggest? [RFAs are listed on page 24 of the 2005 Roadmap - http://sec.gsfc.nasa.gov/sec_roadmap.htm]
Splinter 3:
Acknowledging that new discoveries in Heliophysics are often driven by the utilization of emerging and enabling technologies, what is needed in the areas of mission implementation (e.g. launch vehicles, spacecraft locations, etc.), data acquisition/instrumentation (e.g. remote sensing detectors in-situ measurements, etc.), transmission (e.g. telemetry, recording, etc.) and analysis (e.g. data environments, virtual observatories, modeling, etc.)?
Please visit the Community Input Form page to provide feedback.

Please access the Town Hall Meeting web site http://heliophysics.gsfc.nasa.gov/Townhall08.htm or contact NASA/HQ coordinator Arik Posner for more information.