Celebrating the 2023 and 2024 Eclipses: NOAA is partnering with the NSF and NASA teams to help promote the 2023 and 2024 eclipses. Together we are hosting 4 events across the nation to educate the local population. Each location and the partnerships established will be included, as well as our audience we are trying to reach.

CCOR: NOAA’s New Space Coronagraphs: Space weather is a fascinating applied-science field which has been rising in prominence since it is related to many real-world problems as well as plasma-physics questions. Space weather has the potential to impact technologies in space and on the ground, and importantly place astronauts and certain airline crews at risk. Early warnings of solar and interplanetary activity are therefore valuable to spaceflight managers, satellite operators, electric power-grid managers, and others. Images of the solar corona are particularly important since they can be used to detect coronal mass ejections (CMEs), plasma structures emitted by the Sun that can produce the greatest space weather disruptions on and near Earth. The physics of CMEs contains several unsolved problems in magnetohydrodynamics, magnetic topology, and particle acceleration. In addition to the imagery, measurements of the solar wind upstream of the Earth are useful for driving a wide variety of real-time numerical weather prediction models. The Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) program is developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in close collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The program aims to place two NRL-built Compact Coronagraphs (CCORs) in space, one at geostationary orbit (GEO) in 2024 and one at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 1 (L1) point in 2025. A third coronagraph is planned to be launched on board ESA’s Vigil mission to Lagrange 5 to contribute solar imagery from a different perspective for 3-dimensional mapping of CME structure and motion. I will discuss the SWFO program with emphasis on the coronal observations.

Kim Eaves is the Communications Lead for Education & Outreach at the office of Space Weather Observations within NESDIS/NOAA. She has provided communications support for the office for approximately 9 years, including support for 4 different satellite launches. She is also the Program Lead for the eclipse events.

Dimitris Vassiliadis earned his PhD in space physics at the University of Maryland, College Park and was a postdoc at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center where he worked on magnetospheric dynamics and space weather effects and developed predictive models based on data from spacecraft such as ACE, WIND, SAMPEX, POLAR, etc., and ground magnetometers and other systems. He then taught physics, astronomy, and other subjects in academia where he worked with graduate and undergraduate students on space physics and aerospace engineering projects such as cubesat and sounding-rocket payloads. Since joining NOAA/NESDIS, he has been active in the Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) and Space Weather Next (SW Next) programs and other flight projects.