Uplink 61: Solar Orbiter – Back To Earth & On To Science
Join us on Thursday, 25th November when we’ll be joined by solar physicists Anik De Groof and Louise Harra to discuss the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission, studying our nearby star. Its risky Earth flyby this week marks the start of its main science operations phase, to provide our best understanding of the Sun and the solar wind yet.
Anik De Groof is a solar physicist working for the European Space Agency (ESA) in Madrid, Spain. She is Instrument Operations Scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission that launched in February 2020 and is part of the team coordinating all science observations of the 10 instruments onboard. Anik graduated from K.U. Leuven in Belgium, where she studied maths, astrophysics, and astronomy. She obtained a PhD in Solar Physics and focused her research on the heating of the solar corona. After being involved in the calibration of a new and innovative extreme ultraviolet imager for solar observations, she started working for ESA. She helped develop and run the Science Operations Centre for the PROBA2 mission, before moving to ESA’s ESAC in Spain for the design, development, and operations of the Solar Orbiter Science Operations Centre.
Louise Harra is a solar physicist who studied at Queen's University Belfast, completing a PhD in physics. She moved to Japan to work at ISAS on the Yohkoh/Solar-A spacecraft and was then based at UCL-MSSL in the UK as the project scientist and then principal investigator for the EUV imaging spectrometer on the Japanese Hinode spacecraft, which studies the Sun's magnetic fields. Currently, Louise is Director of the Physical Meteorological Observatory Davos / World Radiation Centre (PMOD/WRC) in Switzerland and Affiliated Professor at ETH-Zürich, the co-principal investigator of Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on Solar Orbiter, and principal investigator for the Solar Spectral Irradiance Monitor on the JAXA Solar-C mission.
We’ll be live from 8pm GMT/9pm CET/3pm ET at: https://youtu.be/w8W_eh6wVeM
