ISSI meets UZH Space Hub

Through this event we would like to offer our Space Community the possibility to discover the activities of ISSI, how UZH members can benfit and contribute and foster the network.

The event is free of charge, but registration is mandatory at the end of this webpage.

When: September 23, 2022        

Where: KOL-G-217 EV

Schedule

Founded in 1995 at the initiative of the late Prof. Johannes Geiss (1926-2020†), the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) is an Institute of Advanced Study where scientists from all over the world meet in a multi‐ and interdisciplinary setting to reach out for new scientific horizons. The main function is to contribute to the achievement of a deeper understanding of the results from space missions, ground‐based observations, and laboratory experiments and adding value to those results through multidisciplinary research in the framework of International Teams, Workshops, Working Groups, Forums, or as individual Visiting Scientists. The program of ISSI covers a wide range of disciplines from the physics of the solar system and planetary sciences to astrophysics and cosmology, and from Earth sciences to astrobiology.
ISSI offers a forum for space scientists, ground-based observers and experimenters, theorists, and modellers to work together, analyse and compare data from a multitude of instruments on a variety of spacecraft and ground-based facilities, thus enabling them to extract or create more science with little additional expenditure.
More than 6200 individual scientists from 60 countries have participated in ISSI activities during the first 25 years of its existence and published the results in scientific publications. Only a dozen staff members are available to handle the complexities of an annual program which sees some 1’000 external scientists giving life to an intricate network of Workshops, International Teams, Forums in the user-friendly but limited facilities of the Institute.
This presentation will give an overview of ISSI’s working philosophy and focus on its ‘Tools’ and activities in Earth Sciences.

Following studies in geology and geo-scientific remote sensing at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Michael Rast joined ESA, mainly establishing mission/science requirements for Earth observation satellites. After a research year at NASA’s JPL, he obtained a doctorate in imaging spectroscopy from space. Following a secondment to the GEO Secretariat, Geneva, as Senior Programme Officer, he headed the Science Strategy Office at ESA’s Earth Observation Centre ESRIN in Frascati, Italy. In 2017, he became Senior Advisor to the Director of Earth Observation Programmes. In January 2022, following his retirement from ESA, he took on a part-time employment as Director of Earth Sciences at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland. He also holds a professorship for terrestrial remote sensing at the Department for Geography of the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich