This work got its start by trying to answer the question "how do you evaluate the scientific performance of the ESA's Science Programme missions?" For many years, the decision makers responsible for the content of the ESA Science Programme have been provided with information for each mission including, but not limited to, the number of publications published, the number of publications that are highly cited, the total number of citations used, various statistical metrics and the number of unique author names. However, this reporting only provides snapshots of these missions and was not widely distributed.
This collection presents results from the ISSI Workshop "Solar and Stellar Dynamos: a New Era", held 13–17 June 2022, which aimed to take stock of the considerable progress in our understanding of many aspects of solar and stellar dynamos that has been made during the last decade. This became possible thanks to a wealth of observations from the ground and from space, the study of simplified models, and a new generation of comprehensive 3D MHD simulations.
Potential climate tipping points pose a growing risk for societies, and policy is calling for improved anticipation of them. Satellite remote sensing can play a unique role in identifying and anticipating tipping phenomena across scales. Where satellite records are too short for temporal early warning of tipping points, complementary spatial indicators can leverage the exceptional spatial-temporal coverage of remotely sensed data to detect changing resilience of vulnerable systems. Combining Earth observation with Earth system models can improve process-based understanding of tipping points, their interactions, and potential tipping cascades. Such fine-resolution sensing can support climate tipping point risk management across scales.
"The Heliosphere in the Local Interstellar Medium", the Proceedings of the First ISSI Workshop 6-10 November 1995, Bern, Switzerland, edited by R. von Steiger, R. Lallement, and M.A. Lee and published in 1996, was the first International Space Science Institute (ISSI) book in the Space Sciences Series. This book covers the knowledge gained in the subsequent 27 years that revolutionized our understanding of the interaction of the heliosphere with the very local interstellar medium (VLISM). Entirely new regions of space have been explored! The Voyagers both crossed the termination shock, passed through the heliosheath, crossed the heliopause, and entered the interstellar medium. New Horizons was launched with more modern instrumentation and explores low-latitude regions of the outer heliosphere. Energetic neutral atoms observed by IBEX and CASSINI allowed exploration of the heliosphere over the whole sky. The initial reconnaissance of the heliosphere and VLISM is complete with in situ measurements, observations of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), neutral VLISM H and He, UV emissions, and interstellar dust.
A new era of lunar exploration has begun bringing immense opportunities for science as well. It has been proposed to deploy a new generation of observatories on the lunar surface for deep studies of our Universe. This includes radio antennas, which would be protected on the far side of the Moon from terrestrial radio interference, and gravitational-wave (GW) detectors, which would profit from the extremely low level of seismic disturbances on the Moon. In recent years, novel concepts have been proposed for lunar GW detectors based on long-baseline laser interferometry or on compact sensors measuring the lunar surface vibrations caused by GWs. In this article, we review the concepts and science opportunities for such instruments on the Moon. In addition to promising breakthrough discoveries in astrophysics and cosmology, lunar GW detectors would also be formidable probes of the lunar internal structure and improve our understanding of the lunar geophysical environment.
The main objective of this book is to provide an overview of the benefit of using Earth Observation data to monitor global environmental changes due to natural phenomena and anthropogenic forcing factors over the African continent, and highlight a number of applications of high societal relevance.
