Information for speakers

Firstly thank you once again for agreeing to speak at the symposium. Your attendance and contribution in time and effort are much appreciated.

Please take note of the programme so you can see the overall context of the meeting and the session your talk is scheduled for, as well as the time allocated to your presentation.

The programme will be updated when the TBAs have been confirmed and if timings need to be modified. Time slots for talks are however very unlikely to change by more than 5-15 minutes.

Discussion

We would hope that 3-5 minutes of each slot will be allocated to questions. Please also note a 30 minute discussion period is planned at the end of each session (morning and afternoon) along with what we hope is adequate time (40 minutes) for discussions and networking over teas/coffee and the poster sessions.

Themes and subthemes

As you are well aware this residential symposium, part of the celebration of 50 years of Leicester in space, occurs at an important time in the evolution of the structure of space activity in the UK and in the development of future observations and science from space. This meeting aims to look at the vision of UK research for the future, synergies across space research fields, potential economic impact and to discuss how academia can best play a strong role within the UK Space Sector.

'Subthemes' of the meeting include the science and technology challenges, future missions (both those in design and build and those under study by agencies as well as ones that will be needed in the future), set in the background of recent results, developments and missions.

We strongly encourage all speakers to speculate on the future!

We would also encourage you to think about how academia might become more organised and form potentially collective views as the UK space industry does, so that community inputs can be given to the UK Space Agency and the Space Leadership Council. Time has been set aside on both the Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the role of academia in the Space sector.

Outcomes

Finally please note we are aiming to write a meeting report for the Royal Astronomical Society’s A&G magazine along with two to three review papers, and perhaps a white paper as an input to the UK Space Agency.

We look forward to your attendance and presentation and in the mean time if you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact the committee via Brian Bassett (e-mail: bb133@le.ac.uk) who is helping organise the meeting on a day to day basis.