Author: Spotlight

Dear friends of ISSI! Dear visitors of our website!

First of all, let me wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a successful and Happy New Year!

For us at ISSI an eventful year comes to an end. The first months of 2022 were still impacted by the pandemic and a quasi-lock down with uncertainties about the threat imposed by the Omicron variant of the Corona virus. Visitor numbers were low, in continuation of the low numbers of the previous fall. But in March and April, the ISSI community came back and there was a lot of catching up to do. A record number of 1031 scientists have attended 100 activities (International Teams, Working Groups, Workshops and Fora) in Bern since then, with more than 700 in addition attending from remote. As noted in my September letter, ISSI was running at 150% of its usual capacity and continued to do so for the rest of the year; a workload happily accepted. It felt so good to be back to (almost) normal!

For me, it is time to say good-bye as executive director at the end of a four-year period. A somewhat “schmalzy” pop song from Cologne in Germany catches my feelings: „Niemals geht man so ganz, ein Stück von mir bleibt hier“. The past four years were “speziell” (as the Bernese would say) in various respects, not just because of Corona. There remains my deep appreciation of the ISSI staff and of what we could achieve together!

What we could achieve – beyond our science program – will hopefully take ISSI forward in the future. ISSI’s popular online seminar series was launched with more than 10,000 attendees to date, a more spacious auditorium built named after ISSI’s founding father Johannes Geiss, and the ISSI tools (the workshops, working groups, teams, fora and the visiting scientist’s program) were made more accessible and flexible. Open access publishing was made the norm. ISSI invested into digitalization and web-based communication services with software apps to ease collaboration and the Johannes Geiss auditorium and the three meeting rooms were equipped with state-of-the-art hardware for hybrid meetings which have become the new norm at ISSI. Finally, we were able to put ISSI’s funding on a more stable foundation and improve the social security plans of the staff.

I am sure that ISSI will continue to flourish over the coming years under its new leadership, with Antonella Nota taking over the executive director’s position on January 1^st. I am confident that ISSI will keep serving the entire space science community with all the aspects and subfields it served over the past more than 25 years, keeping a good balance and producing excellent research!

All the best

Tilman Spohn 

Outgoing ISSI executive director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our web site,

I hope you had a good and relaxing summer! 

Actually, the Swiss summer as in many parts of Europe was exceptionally sunny, dry and warm. Together with the increased number of unusually warm seasons this decade, it is widely regarded as a consequence of climate change. Quite fittingly, ISSI’s Game Changers Seminar series this spring dealt with aspects of climate change, including the risks to the water budget and how to fight the crisis. Interested, but missed the talks? They are recorded and available here like all the other previous Game Changers Seminar talks. 

This fall – starting this Thursday – the Game Changers Seminar series will be dedicated to “Captivating Cosmology: From the Big Bang to Tomorrow”. The first talk will be by philosopher and physicist Tim Maudlin, who will speak about his ideas on the origin of the relativistic structure of space-time. 

Cosmology and space observation in general received a big boost last Christmas with the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The JWST observes at unprecedented resolution and will look deeper into space and thus further back in time then any other telescope before, including the Hubble Space Telescope. ISSI celebrated the first release of JWST images and data on July 12th as the Swiss node of a worldwide network of events. The event at ISSI included presentations by Swiss scientists who either contributed to the JWST hardware or had successfully competed for observing time. The event was broadcast on our Youtube channel and the recording is available. As is the tradition on such happy occasions, the day closed with the Swiss institution of an Apéro reception.

At the moment, ISSI is running its program at an estimated 150% of its capacity, with many weeks with three teams in attendance, plus other meetings in parallel, rather than the usual two. The ISSI directorate is exceedingly thankful to the staff for taking on this extra work load. With the increased number of visitors comes an increased risk of infection, however, and therefore ISSI continues to ask visitors to wear masks on its premises. These measures helped keeping the transmission of COVID under control.

Also in the spring, ISSI was evaluated by a Visiting Committee of internationally renowned scientists, chaired by Dr. Stephan Ulamec of DLR. Their very positive report boosted the motivation of the entire ISSI staff in these demanding times.

With the beginning of September, ISSI once again has a complete staff. Prof. Thierry Dudok de Wit started his term as Space Science director at ISSI on September 1^st. Also, Dr. Roland Hohensinn joined the team as Earth Science post-doctoral fellow, working with Earth Science director Michael Rast on climate related remote sensing data and uncertainties in climate variable time series, for which he will use machine-learning methods. On June 1^st already, Prof. Rumi Nakamura joined as discipline scientist, helping the institute with her expertise in plasma physics. Finally, on May 15^th Dr. Christian Malacaria started his post-doc fellowship in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Christian will work with Astronomy and Astrophysics director Maurizio Falanga on high-energy astrophysics of black holes and neutron stars.

ISSI welcomes the new staff members and is extremely thankful to them for making themselves available. 

Stay safe and come to meet at ISSI anytime soon!
 
All the best
Tilman Spohn  
ISSI executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

I hope you had a good and healthy start into the New Year!

ISSI like so many others have been hit by the Delta and Omicron Corona virus waves at the end of last year and the first months of the present year. Unfortunately, this time some of us got infected with varying degrees of severeness of symptoms. Now that the numbers have begun to decrease, we prepare to resume our program. Meetings by International Teams and Working Groups have been scheduled for the second half of February onwards and the first Workshop – on the Saturnian System – is planned to be held in May 2022. We are looking forward to busy times because so many events had to be postponed.

The 2022 call for International Team proposals is presently open on the ISSI web site with a deadline of March 17^th. This call is jointly with ISSI-Beijing. Another open call is for applications for Visiting Scientists. Researchers of all career stages are invited to submit – at any time of the year – research proposals to apply to spend time at ISSI as a Visiting Scientist. The application is open to all scientists who are actively involved in any of the space science research fields. ISSI has – through its history – supported short visits of individual scientists to its premises in Bern. The many visits over the years by eminent scientists have left a prominent mark on the institute.  Given its success, the directorate has recently decided to make this opportunity more accessible by offering a web interface for applications.  

There have been changes in the ISSI directorate and staff as we entered into the new year. Dr. Anny Cazenave, Earth Science director for nine years, ended her term with the end of 2021 and was followed by Prof. Michael Rast. Mike, as we call him, has long been a friend of the institute serving as one of ESA’s liaisons on the Science Committee. Anny has left her mark on ISSI’s record with eight volumes of the Space Science Series published to date under her direction and one more in the writing. By the end of January, Prof. Álvaro Giménez-Canete ended his service as ISSI discipline scientist. Álvaro has been coordinating Forums in Astronomy for ISSI and has been a great adviser. Finally, Julia Venturini finished her term as ISSI postdoctoral research fellow by the end of the same month. Julia will continue working in exoplanet research. We wish her all the best for her future career.  Anny, Julia and Álvaro will remain friends of the institute!

In January 2022, we started another series of ten talks in the Game Changer series, this time on “Habitability from Galactic to Microbial Scales”. The series started off with a talk by Prof. Antonio Lazcano of the University of Mexico on the “the Origin of Life” which happened to be the 50^th seminar talk in the series and with 350 visitors one of the most popular ones. The seminars are recorded and available on our website.

Finally, we are sad to report that Dr. Vittorio Manno, former and first Science Program manager of ISSI between 1995 and 2009 passed away on February 1^st, 2022 in Brussels where he lived. He will be remembered by all ISSI staff members who have certainly lost a very elegant, respected colleague and a very dear friend.

Stay safe and hope to meet you all in person at ISSI sometime soon!

All the best

Tilman Spohn 

ISSI executive director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

As we are heading towards the first Sunday of Advent and the festive season, we could say that this fall has been good to us if it were not for the rising COVID-19 infection numbers of the past few weeks. We had two workshops and a forum – albeit as hybrid events – but with about half of the participants here at the institute while the others followed from remote. Our new audio-video system proofed extremely useful and made participation from remote the second best after being at the institute in person. A software update and recalibration had removed some “nervousness” of the cameras that were chasing speakers and refocusing just a bit too much. The audio continues to be superb. The workshops were the “Venus: Evolution Through Time” workshop in September coordinated by Colin Wilson and colleagues and the “Heliosphere in the Local Interstellar Medium” workshop coordinated by Andrei Bykov and Ruedi von Steiger in November. The latter workshop had the same title as the first ever workshop at ISSI and we were fortunate enough to have two of the participants from then participating in person this time as well. The science has evolved, but the subject continues to be of interest and relevance. The workshop was honoring Johannes Geiss, the founding father of ISSI and the coordinator of the first workshop. 

This past week we hosted a forum on “Ground and Space Based Astronomy” that Álvaro Giménez and Joachim Wambsganss coordinated. Both have been hoping for having the forum fully in person in Bern but after postponing several times, they finally agreed that a hybrid forum was better than postponing once again. For Joachim, the event marked an endpoint of his service as an ISSI director as he had left end of September after four years of service. The ISSI directorate and staff had thanked and congratulated him during the first combined directorate and staff meeting that month and wished him all the best for the future. Negotiations with a successor to Joachim are ongoing now.

In addition to the two workshops and the forum, we saw ten teams meet at the institute and expect four more to come in December. Moreover, two working groups “Extant subsurface Life on Mars? Science, Tools & Missions Together” and “Towards a Universal Tracers Portal in Astrobiology” kicked-off their activities through two online meetings over several days. The first of the two is a joint effort by ISSI, ISSI Beijing and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research CIFAR. 

The Game Changer Seminar Series has been continuing successfully every Thursday at 17:00. As we do have a significant number of participants from the United States, we will pause this week for the Thanksgiving holiday and resume next week. Please see our website for the talks scheduled up to Christmas and for the recordings of the past seminars. We are planning the series resume in the new year when we will focus on an interdisciplinary subject with contributions from all fields of space sciences that ISSI covers.

Finally, let me report briefly on the ISSI yearly dinner that was held at the Hotel Bellevue Palace with 104 guests present including many of the participants of the Heliosphere workshop. The highlight of the evening was a lecture by Nobel laureate Michel Mayor on the continuing hunt for exoplanets and the search for traces of extraterrestrial life.

Let me close this letter by pointing to the Pro ISSI online talk this coming Wednesday at 18:15 on “A Warming Indian Ocean on Planet Earth: Changes in Ocean Circulation, Sea Level and Heat Content” by 2020 Johannes Geiss Fellow Weiqing Han of the University of Colorado.

On behalf of the institute, let me wish you and your loved ones a peaceful festive season! And, if you have not yet received your vaccination or your booster shot consider getting it as soon as possible thus helping to protect yourself and your fellow people.

All the best

Tilman Spohn 

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

It almost feels like a relaunch! Since the beginning of this month of September, we have visitors again at ISSI. We started off with an International Team in the first week of the month (Sept 6–10) working on plasmas in the vicinity of comets and of Mars and this week (Sept 13–17) we host a team working on Pulsars. These are the first in person team meetings at ISSI in 1.5 years, since March 2020! There will be more International Teams coming to ISSI in September and the following months as you can see in our calendar which is quite full. Moreover, this second week of September (13–17) we are hosting the first ISSI Workshop since the Deep Earth Interior Workshop a year ago! The subject of the present workshop is the Evolution of the Interior of Venus. The subject is particularly timely since earlier this year NASA and ESA chose THREE missions to Venus for the coming years. Many of the workshop conveners and participants are involved in these missions, in particular in the ESa EnVision mission and the NASA Veritas mission but the NASA DaVinci mission is also represented.

The Venus workshop had been postponed two times and the workshop and book project was finally launched adopting the new alternative scheme that ISSI had designed to better cope with COVID-19 Implications. The scheme starts the project off with an online meeting and has the in person meeting in the flow of the project when book chapters have been devised and/or (partly) written. The workshop is then used to discuss the chapters and their science content and the relations between chapters. We find this week that this works very well and motivates lively discussions. Because of COVID still being around the workshop is hybrid with about half of the participants joining remotely. We find that the investment in our state-of-the-art audio and video system pays off and eliminates some of the major disadvantages of hybrid meetings, such as discussion in the room cannot easily be followed from remote. If those speculating that the hybrid format will continue to be with us for some time are right then ISSI can say that it is well equipped for the task.

Also, in this month of September we will resume the Game Changers Online Seminar series with a talk on Venus Exploration by Richard Ghail from the University of London, one of the masterminds of the ESA EnVision mission. The program until the end of the year is still under development – we admit that we are a bit late – but should be in its final form by the end of this week. Stay tuned! We will cover a wide range of subjects from astrophysics and planetary science to climate change and astrobiology.

Of course, nobody can say with great confidence how the situation with COVID will evolve, in particular in Switzerland. But we hope that we can continue with our program even through coming the fall and winter. We have a set of rules at the institute and require visitors to be either vaccinated, recovered from the disease or negatively tested.

With my best regards

Tilman Spohn

Dear friends of ISSI,

Dear visitors of our web site,

As we proceed into the summer infection rates are pleasingly low although the Delta variant of the virus is causing concern. Activities at ISSI are picking up for September onwards with team meetings and the planned workshop on “Venus: Evolution Through Time”. We at ISSI certainly hope that the increasing number of vaccinations will keep Delta at bay and allow activities to continue in the fall and winter. 

Here at the institute things are evolving with significant changes in the staff and the directorate now and ahead of us! Look for spotlights in due time as we say farewell and welcome our new members or old friends in new responsibilities:

First of all, let me report that at its last meeting the ISSI Board of Trustees has awarded Prof. Roger-Maurice Bonnet with the ISSI honorary directorship for life. Prof Bonnet thus follows in the footsteps of ISSI’s founding father Prof. Johannes Geiss. The board thus acknowledges the “pivotal role and expressing deep gratitude for his steady and effective support and leadership that has made ISSI a beacon in space science.” The ISSI staff and directors congratulate Prof. Bonnet on this highly-deserved honor. Prof. Bonnet is in our Spotlight this week!

By the end of the month, Prof. Ruedi von Steiger will retire from his positions at the University of Bern and at ISSI and will be followed by Prof. Maurizio Falanga. Maurizio, known to many of you as our Science Program Manager will be followed as of September 15^th by Dr. Mark Sargent. He is a lecturer in Astronomy at the University of Sussex board and presently on sabbatical leave visiting with the University of Geneve

ISSI is deeply thankful to Ruedi von Steiger who has served the institute right from the beginning. His continued service has fundamentally helped to make ISSI what it is today. We will honor Ruedi on July 29^th at 17:00 CDT with a special issue of the weekly Game Changers Seminar.

Finally, the ISSI board of Trustees at its last meeting decided to offer the position of ISSI Earth Science director to Prof. Michael Rast. Prof.  Rast will join the ISSI directorate as of Jan 1^st, 2022 and will follow in the footsteps of Prof. Anny Cazenave. Prof. Rast is known to ISSI since the beginning of the Earth Science program at the institute having served as ex-officio member of the ISSI Science Committee.

Stay safe and I hope to see you all back in person at ISSI sometime soon!

Tilman Spohn

ISSI executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI,

Dear visitors of our web site,

As you all know, we have entered into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The institute continues to be a quiet place with staff working mostly from home as is required by Swiss law. Visits to ISSI require testing on the way to Switzerland and back and I – for one – have gotten quite used to having regular PCR tests. To date, none of the staff has been infected, fortunately, and some of us have received their (first) vaccination shots. We – like everybody else – hope that the vaccination campaign speeds up and that indeed people can be vaccinated by the summer or by the end of the season.

While the institute remains a quiet place ISSI activities are continuing (compare our Annual Report just published). International Teams and Working Groups continue to be meeting online. The “Global Change in Africa” workshop was held in January with most participating remotely as was the “Tipping Points in the Earth’s Climate”- Forum the same months. The “Venus: Evolution through Time” as well as the “The Heliosphere in the Local Interstellar Medium” and the “Strong Gravitational Lensing” workshop teams are proceeding following the new alternative scheme for the workshop-to-book process in which the chapter writing starts after an online kick-off and with regular online tag-ups. The in-person workshop will be organized as the pandemic allows in the flow of the project and will be largely devoted to discussions of the then matured subject. Other workshops and forums are still postponed, however, waiting for the end of the crisis.

Our online seminar series about missions that changed the game in the space sciences has ended with the month of March, after 28 lectures had been given. Recordings of these are available here on our website and continue to be downloaded often. The ISSI directorate decided to continue the series albeit changing gears to some degree. Rather than presenting missions, we will during the months of May to July look at “Ideas and Findings about the Solar System, the Universe and our Terrestrial Environment”. The first talk will be on tipping points in the Earth’s climate on May 6^thand we will then proceed to present a wide variety of subjects in Earth, Solar and Planetary sciences and Astrophysics (see the schedule here). We are extremely proud to have been able to recruit leaders of their fields as speakers, including physics Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Reinhard Genzel. Come and join us for these extraordinary events!

Stay safe and I hope to meet you all in person at ISSI sometime soon!

Tilman Spohn

ISSI executive Director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

As this unusual year is coming to an end, things are still progressing at ISSI despite the hindrances related to the pandemic! International teams keep working albeit mostly remotely and we have been reported to date more then 200 publications resulting from their work! We are working here at ISSI on setting up an online tool box to support team work and hope to have the first version ready for testing early in the new year. For the workshops we are trying an alternative procedure for the process of getting from the workshop to the corresponding ISSI Space Science Series book. In this new alternative scenario, we will kick-off the process of chapter writing via an online meeting and have the face-to-face workshop later in the process. That way we will avoid letting the pandemic delay us by too long.  Conveners for three of our workshops planned for next year have agreed to give the new procedure a try. The conveners of the “Global Change in Africa” workshop, instead, have decided to hold their workshop in a mostly online to hybrid format (as travel restrictions will allow) in January. That also applies to the related Forum on “Tipping Points in the Earth Climate” organized together with ESA. The “Global Change in Africa” workshop will the first in our new workshop line entitled “Global Change and its Societal Impact”. ISSI is extremely proud to start this new workshop series early next year. We hope for valuable contributions to the scientific debate on the anthropogenic changes to our planet.

The Game Changer Missions Seminar Series continues to go strong with 150-250 visitors per event and will be finishing the astronomy mission seminar talks by Christmas. In the new year, we will be starting a series of seminar talks on Earth Observation missions that will take us into March. The talks to date have all been recorded and are available for view on our website.  

Unfortunately, two of our staff Alexandra Lehmann and Saliba F. Saliba will leave ISSI by the end of the year, moving on to new challenges in their lives. But we have already found wonderful new colleagues to replace them, Yemisi Momoh as secretary and Willi Wäfler as IT manager and engineer. While we are sad to see Alexandra and Saliba leave after all those years – a big Thank You to both of them for their great service – we are looking forward to working with Yemisi and Willi. Please find short portraits of them on the web site.

We at ISSI wish all of you a peaceful and healthy Christmas time! Our thoughts continue to be with those severely hit by the pandemic!

All the best

Tilman Spohn

ISSI executive director

Dear friends of ISSI!

Dear visitors of our website!

Scientists can easily understand the instability of the situation when the coronavirus reproduction factor is about one as it has been in many countries in Europe throughout the summer. It simply says that the virus will be kept alive in the population. A slight change in the environmental parameters, e.g., a lowering of the temperature as we are entering into fall causing people to stay more inside, can cause the factor to rise and trigger exponential growth of the number of infections. Which is what we are seeing these days. Certainly, many of us had hoped that the factor would have been forced significantly below one, in which case there would have been a chance of eliminating the virus. But a society is a complicated system with many more factors – economic, political, psychological – entering into the equation and we may have found empirically that the reproduction-factor-of-one-solution at acceptably small absolute numbers was the best to be expected this summer.

In any case, ISSI has to face the fact that the COVID-19 crisis is likely going to continue for much longer than we – may be naively – had hoped and that it will impact our program even more than we had feared! We did have a successful hybrid workshop in September on the Deep Earth Interior but it appears that attendance in presence from other parts of Europe is becoming increasingly impractical and has become impractical for many. Visitors to ISSI from a growing number of countries will have to go into quarantine for 10 days should they come to Bern and it is not unlikely that they may have to go in quarantine in their own country when they come home after the event. The borders in Europe are open, but it is not very reasonable and practical to travel! This observation is the reason why teams and workshop conveners are continuing to shift their meetings to later.   

 At ISSI, we are exploring even more what the world wide web has to offer to help us through the crisis. Since August, we are having a weekly online seminar series on missions that have changed the game in the space sciences. This “Game Changers” seminar series (Thursdays at 5pm CEST) has started with seven talks on planetary exploration missions and has now turned to heliosphere and plasma missions and will turn to astronomy and astrophysics missions in November and December. The talks have all been recorded and are available for view on our website. Attendance to the seminars varied between 150 and 265 and download figures peeked at more than 1600. We have planned the seminar until the end of the year for now, but we will see what we will have to follow-on next year. In addition, we are brainstorming with the community on how we can improve the working situation for the active International Teams and the planned Workshops, Working Groups and Forums. Some of the ideas and online solutions will be tried in the coming months and hopefully, some will even have the potential to be useful when the crisis will finally be over.

Finally, let me turn to our 25^th anniversary that has received not as much attention as it would have in more normal times: ISSI turned 25, already in January! Unfortunately, we mourned the passing of Johannes Geiss, the institute’s founding father, that month. We had made plans in late 2019 how to celebrate but these needed first to be postponed and have now become largely unfeasible. But, we have a little birthday present upcoming for the community!

Stay tuned and stay healthy and our thoughts continue to be with those severely hit by the pandemic

All the best

Tilman Spohn

ISSI executive director

Dear friends of ISSI,
Dear visitors of our web page,

in the continuing COVID-19 crisis, ISSI is proud to announce its first online tools!

No worries, ISSI will remain committed to its mission of providing the international Space Science Community with a forum for meeting and discussion in an informal and productive atmosphere here in Bern and document the result in the literature! As we value face-to-face analog meetings (as some call them) we are now following up on earlier ideas to increase our usage of digital media. As announced on our web site we will start at the end of the month an online seminar series on missions as “Game Changers”. How often have scientists been sure to more or less know what was in front of them when they saw their mission launched? After all, it has to be that way to some extent, as engineers need an understanding of the environment they design the spacecraft and instruments for. And how often have we been completely surprised by what we found? Internationally renowned experts and leaders in missions will let us know what they think their mission changed. We will start the series end of July with a block of four missions, covering the fantastic Japanese sample return missions Hayabusa 1 and 2, the New Horizons Mission to the exotic world of Pluto and the deep outer Solar System and surprises from our neighboring planets Mars and Venus revealed by Mars and Venus Express. We are planning some more seminar talks on Solar System missions before we will consider extending the series to ISSI’s other fields of space science.

A second tool that we will be experimenting with is called the Tea(m) Time Tuesday. We will give ISSI teams the opportunity to meet amongst themselves and with ISSI scientists around tea time on Tuesdays to discuss their project. And, as a third experiment, we will be giving International Teams 25 seconds (in commemoration of the 25 years of ISSI) to present their science on ISSI’s website. So, stay tuned and watch our website for upcoming news and events!

In other developments at ISSI, we had what we now call a hybrid-meeting (partly in person, partly from remote) of the Board of Trustees in June. Among the important decisions taken was an extension of the present 25^thbusiness year to get the ISSI business year in synch with the calendar year. Up to this year, ISSI business years were running from July to June, they will now run from January to December. Moreover, the Board, observing that open access was increasingly called for by scientists and funding agencies, gave the ISSI directorate a mandate to negotiate open access for ISSI’s publications.   

Let me close by reemphasizing my hope that you and your loved ones stay safe. Our thoughts and sympathies continue to be with those all over the world hit by COVID 19!

Stay safe and hope to meet you all in person at ISSI sometime soon!

Tilman Spohn

ISSI executive Director