The ESA Heliophysics Working Group: building cross-discipline bridges to better serve the European Heliophysics community

Heliophysics, the science of understanding the Sun and its interaction with the Earth and the solar system, has a large and active international community, with significant expertise and heritage in the European Space Agency and Europe. Several ESA directorates have activities directly connected with this topic, including ongoing and/ or planned missions and instrumentation, comprising a ESA Heliophysics observatory or more musically, a Heliophysics Orchestra. More specifically in ESA: The Directorate of Science with mission such as Ulysses, SOHO, Cluster, Solar Orbiter, SMILE etc, as well as hosting the Heliophysics archive; The Directorate of Earth Observation with Swarm and other Earth Explorer missions, as well as the ongoing ESA-NASA Lower Thermosphere-Ionosphere Science Working Group (EN-LoTIS-WG); The Directorate of Operations with the Vigil mission, the Distributed Space Weather Sensor System (D3S) and the Space Weather Service Network; The Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration with many ISS and LOP-Gateway payloads and the Directorate of Technology, Engineering Quality with expertise in developing instrumentation and models for measuring and simulating environments throughout the heliosphere.

An ESA Heliophysics Working group has been appointed by several ESA Directors, under the direction of the ESA Director General, to work on optimizing synergies across directorates, and to act as a focus for discussion, inside ESA, of the scientific interests of the Heliophysics community, including the European ground-based community and data archiving activities.