Italian SWA Contribution
Welcome to the Website of the Italian SWA community!
The main goal of this Website is to serve as an information and aggregation tool for the national community although international colleagues are warmly invited to participate. A virtual place where to get news about the project, to inform the community, to exchange ideas, graphs and upload/download documents, etc.
First release of SWA Data
The first SWA science data were released on the 30th November. SWA L1 and L2 data covering 15th June to 6th September have being delivered and are publicly available via the ESA Solar Orbiter Archive along with the SWA Data Product Definition Document containing a description of the available data products.
Copyright: ESA/ATG medialab
Astronomy & Astrophysics special issue on the Solar Orbiter mission is now published. It features a series of 17 papers on the mission and its instruments.
Follow Solar Orbiter along its orbit
Next Meetings:
National initiatives
National Solar Orbiter InfoDay meeting
The Italian Solar Orbiter InfoDay, organized by Italian PIs and ASI in collaboration with ESA, was held at ASI HQ, in Rome, on December the 2nd , 2019. The main goal of this one-day event was that of presenting the mission to the national heliophysics/heliospheric community, focusing on the orbit, the payload, the data policy and the national contribution to the mission. The response of the community was enthusiastic and more than 80 scientists from all over Italy attended the meeting, demonstrating how great is the scientific interest about this mission.
The last part of the day was dedicated to an open discussion to focus on future scientific activities, aiming to stimulate new collaborations and synergies to maximize the scientific return of the mission.
In this framework, the national community mainly interested in in-situ observations had been invited in September (see below) to illustrate possible scientific cases based on in-situ data, with particular emphasis on SWA measurements . The lively response of the community was such that about 20 abstracts were received from all the Italian groups and also from Italian scientists working abroad. This propedeutical exercise gave the opportunity to discuss several scientific topics initiating, de facto, a desirable collaborative process. This is much relevant if we want to prepare our community in the best possible way to fully exploit the extraordinary possibilities offered by Solar Orbiter to study heliospheric plasma.
National working groups on in-situ data
During September 2019, in view of the National Solar Orbiter Info-Day meeting of December the 2nd, the Italian heliospheric community was invited to show their interest in the in-situ observations, and in particular in SWA measurements, providing different scientific cases.
About 20 abstracts were received and organized in 4 distinct areas:
The next step is that of organizing the community in these 4 main groups in order to have people talking to each other about their respective scientific interest, aiming to avoid duplications and fostering collaborations. This process is also necessary for us, the SWA team, to understand whether the observations provided by SWA meet the requirements necessary for that particular study.
For each group a coordinator (*) has been designed, whose specific task is that of (i) stimulating discussions and (ii) organizing telecons every 2 weeks(?) during which the various groups are invited to present their activity followed by a general discussion. In principle, each coordinator already knows what the various groups want to work on (abstracts received in September) and should create a calendar, for the various contributions, to be discussed and agreed on within the respective research area. This is a fast and efficient way to create possible synergies. Moreover, each coordinator (iii) will manage her/his respective page within the national web site “Solar Orbiter- Italian SWA” in which she/he will report related activities/news and will store documents and, whenever possible, presentations.
(*)
Kinetic processes: Francesco Valentini (UNICAL)
Multiscale: Raffaella D’Amicis (INAF-IAPS)
Particle energization: Silvia Perri (UNICAL)
ML and AI: Rossana DeMarco (INAF-IAPS)