Community News
The SHINE 2024 workshop will be held in-person only in Juneau, Alaska from August 12 to 16, 2024
Early Bird Registration Deadline: July 14, 2024
Final Registration Deadline: July 26, 2024
Attendance Cap: Attendance will be capped at 300 – 350 participants. Registration will close when the cap is met.
Deadline for abstract submission: TBA (Participants can continue to edit their abstracts until the meeting day)
SHIELD Webinar: “The Human Spirit Can Make The ‘Impossible’ Possible: What space exploration can learn about passion, persistence, and resilience from a groundbreaking athlete.” (Monday, August 19, 2pm ET)
A conversation between Diana Nyad and Merav Opher
Any challenging human endeavor requires both passion, perseverance, and resilience. This is true when both pushing the edges of the human body’s physical endurance, or the boundaries of our understanding of the universe.
Diana Nyad, a world renown marathon swimmer and a member of the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, overcame extraordinary challenges to swim the open ocean from Cuba to Key West Florida. Her passion, perseverance and resilience were key to ultimately succeeding after multiple attempts at this extraordinary feat.
Merav Opher, is a Professor of Astronomy at Boston University and a Harvard Radcliffe Fellow. She is the leader of the SHIELD DRIVE Science Research Center, one of the three NASA funded centers to tackle breakthrough science. SHIELD’s goal is to create a twin analog of the heliosphere, the bubble formed by the solar wind as it encounters the interstellar medium. It took passion, perseverance, and resilience to build a multi-institution team composed of members who hold strong diverse opinions about the shape of our heliosphere and how to understand the science behind it.
Join the webinar for a conversation between Diana Nyad and Prof. Opher as they explore the meaning and value of passion, perseverance, and resilience.
Registration link: https://bostonu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zmIYnKlRRk2Fg9w4QGUXDQ#/registration
Termination Shock Virtual Workshop: Looking Forward to the New Horizons Encounter: August 19th (10 am - 1 pm) and 20th (10 am - 3 pm)
New Horizons is currently 58 AU from the Sun, near the solar equatorial plane, and close to the same longitude as Voyager 2, which crossed the Termination Shock at 84 AU. Depending on the shape and solar wind pressure, New Horizons could cross the Termination Shock in 5-8 years. Energetic particles streaming in from the Termination Shock could give a few years warning of the crossing. In preparation for this crossing, this virtual workshop will discuss previous Termination Shock data and models. Discussions will also focus on New Horizons observations which will help us to understand the Termination Shock physics and the heliosheath beyond it. Scene-setting talks will be followed by open discussion. All are invited!
Registration Link: https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEuc-qgrDwsGtCu0YBk_XEqiP_dPJeKBRsFSHIELD
SHIELD Seed Funding and Early Career Support
Due Date: July 31, 2024
The SHIELD Team requests science proposals for SHIELD Seed funding and Early Career support.
The SHIELD NASA DRIVE Center (https://shielddrivecenter.com) is an international collaboration involving researchers from over half a dozen institutions, and led by Merav Opher from the Astronomy Department at Boston University. SHIELD’s goals are to: (1) determine the global nature of the heliosphere; (2) determine how pickup ions evolve from ‘cradle to grave’ and affect heliospheric processes; (3) establish how the heliosphere interacts with and influences the LISM; and (4) understand how cosmic rays are filtered by and transported through the heliosphere.
Seed Funding supports ideas that, although related to the proposed SHIELD work, represent a departure because they are innovative, emergent, and possibly high-risk.
Early career funding supports undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs working on SHIELD-related projects.
The proposal instructions are on the SHIELD web site (https://shielddrivecenter.com/shield-seed-funding/).
Contacts: Merav Opher (mopher@bu.edu) and John Richardson (jdr@space.mit.edu)