Biography
Miho Janvier is a space physicist at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, France, who is currently on secondment to the European Space Agency. She is working to understand when solar activity occurs, how solar storms travel in space and how they impact planetary environments in the solar system. She uses data from space missions from NASA, ESA and JAXA and analyses and develop with her team 3D computer models of solar eruptions.
Miho is deputy project scientist on the instrument SPICE as well as a scientific co-Investigator on the instrument EUI on board Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency mission to explore the Sun and its close neighbourhood.
Her passion for astrophysics and science communication has led her to develop several science communication projects, and has set up a non-profit organisation called SpaceTravelVR (www.spacetravelvr.com). Miho was named WIRED UK Innovation fellow in 2016 and has been a TED Fellow since 2017
Solar physics: Studying the Sun with Solar Orbiter
Since the dawn of time, our star, the Sun, has been part of our daily lives. Revered by different human civilizations, studied from (almost!) every angle, we might believe that the Sun no longer holds any secrets for us. And yet, it is quite the opposite: our beaming star never ceases to surprise us. With the advent of ground and space exploration, we have learned in the past century that the Sun’s impact is felt on Earth through a variety of phenomena such as solar flares, and extends to the confines of the solar system. Living in the neighbourhood of a star like the Sun holds many mysteries that recently launched space probes seek to elude. We will journey in this presentation to and away from the Sun to reveal some of these mysteries through the splendour of its atmosphere, the solar corona.