Travel Grant: International School/Symposium for Space Simulations (ISSS) and Interrelationship between Plasma Experiments in the Laboratory and in Space (IPELS) Student Support

This travel proposal will support five US students to attend The International School for Space Simulations (ISSS) in Munich, Germany. ISSS was first held in 1982 in Japan as a collaboration between leading scientists from the USA, Asia and Europe, in order to teach basic simulation techniques to students going into this growing field. The ISSS meetings have provided new generations of students with a basic understanding of numerical simulation techniques and is for many their first exposure to cutting edge space science research.

The first three days of the ISSS meeting comprise the School portion and include intensive hands-on training with experts in the field such that when finished students will learn how different types of codes work, including particle in cell (PIC), hybrid and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD), and will have run the codes themselves to produce output and graph the results. Basic simulation codes are given to the students, which are theirs to keep after the meeting for further use and study.

The symposium portion of the meeting will be held immediately after the school portion. It allows students who have just learned the basics of the various codes to interact with world experts who conduct cutting-edge research in space science. This School and Symposium approach has proven to be very effective for students in maximizing the knowledge gained from the meeting over the years.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.