The Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Thermosphere (MIT) Forum was successfully held in Beijing on October 31 – November 1, 2013. This forum was organized by the International Space Science Institute-Beijing (ISSI-BJ) and sponsored by the National Space Science Center (NSSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and by the State Key Laboratory of Space Weather. More than 20 scientists from USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Romania and China attended the forum.

The meeting was convened by Chi Wang, National Space Science Center, CAS, China; Berndt Klecker, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), Germany, Andrew Yau, University of Calgary, Canada and Yong Liu, National Space Science Center, CAS, China.

MIT is one of the candidates missions of the Intensive Preparative Study of Future Space Science Missions, which aim at selecting appropriate new space science missions to be implemented during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020). This mission aims at investigating the coupling of the magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere (MIT). The oxygen outflow from the ionosphere into the magnetosphere is considered to be a key question to the MIT coupling. One reason is that the ion outflow plays a very important role in the magnetic storm, and a second reason is that the outflow affects the period of the saw tooth oscillation.

The discussion covered a broad aspect of topics: the history, current status and future of MIT mission, overall design of the project, scientific objectives, key techniques and potential international cooperation. It focused on key questions related to the coupling of magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere and techniques to develop space-borne particle detectors.

The participants raised a lot of constructive comments and instructive suggestions to the project organization.

More information about the participants and the presentations can be found here and a detailed report will be published soon.