From August 29 to Sept. 1, the 4th International Living with a Star （ILWS）Science Workshop was held in Beijing Friendship Hotel. The participating scholars come from a wide range of oversea organizations and institutes including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CAS), Space Research Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Korean Space Research Institute, Harvard University. There are also an array of Chinese institutes and Universities participating in the workshop including National Space Science Center, CAS, China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), Peking University, University of Science and Technology of China and Wuhan University. The experts and scholars coming from home and abroad reached 100.
The opennig ceremony is hosted by Wang Chi, Deputy Director General of National Space Science Center (NSSC). A progress report of ILWS was made by Wu Ji, the rotating president of International Living with a Star program and the Director General of NSSC, who also introduced the current situation of Chinese Space Science Satellites. A warm welcome was offered to the present guests. Representatives from China National Space Administration attended the science workshop.
The schedule of the workshop was tight and four sessions were included in the four days’ meeting. The four sessions mainly focused on the system at extreme solar quiescence and the rise to solar maximum, the system under normal solar wind conditions, including substorms, energetic particle and photon effects on geospace, and the CME chain of extreme mass-flow events, including storms. On the Steering committee prior to the workshop, the representatives from Canada, China, ESA, NASA and Russia report their current space science programs and the research progress. Arrangements for the 10 years anniversary of ILWS next year was also made and agreement was reached by all the representatives on the timetable for the anniversary and the next ILWS workshop which will take place in USA.
The holding of the science workshop promotes the exchanges and communications on solar-terrestrial space science among the ILWS member countries and creates opportunities for learning from the major space countries, which will definitely lay a solid foundation for the coordination and collaboration among member countries.
ILWS, which derived from Inter-Agency Consultative Group (IACG), was initiated by the space agencies from several major space countries: NASA, ESA, Canadian Space Agency and French Space Agency in 2002. In 2004, China National Space Administration was invited to join in the program. In 2010, Professor Wu Ji took over the position of rotating president. The science workshop is held every other year with the aim to promote the global recognition of the tenet of ILWS to power the science research on the effects of solar-terrestrial space on human activities.
