Applications are invited for the 2019 Heliophysics Summer School, which will be held July 23 - 30, 2019 in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. Approximately 35 graduate students or first or second year postdoctoral fellows will learn about the exciting science of heliophysics as a broad, coherent discipline that reaches in space from the Earth’s troposphere to the depths of the Sun, and in time from the formation of the solar system to the distant future. The theme of this year's school is "Heliophysics Exploration" (see 'Read More').
Application Deadline: February 22, 2019

For additional information on the Summer School and instructions on how to apply:
https://cpaess.ucar.edu/heliophysics/summer-school/recruitment-announcement

Educational opportunities are available at NASA for students at all levels. Applications are now being accepted for 2019 summer internships with a deadline of April 1, 2019. NASA also makes competitive awards to support independent research by faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students. A Pathways program offers paths to Federal interships for student from high school through post-graduate studies.

For more details and answers to specific questions regarding NASA Summer 2019 internships click on the 'Read More' to this News item. The NASA hosting web site is https://intern.nasa.gov

For a complete listing of posted student internships click on the menu item 'Student Opportunities' or directly on http://vt.superdarn.org/tiki-index.php?page=Student+Interest

PI Dag Lorentzen has reported an unfortunate incident at the site of the Longyearbyen SuperDARN radar. In his words: 'All masts in both the main and interferometer array broke down due to high winds and ice loading. Although the antenna arrays have withstood two Svalbard winters, the current combined icing and wind conditions were enough to break the masts, most likely due to the heavy load of the fence and guy wires. The shipping container with the radar electronics is undamaged. With winter approaching we will unfortunately not be able to make any repairs, so the radar will most likely be out of commission for about 1 year.'

It was noted that the radar had been producing excellent data. The entire SuperDARN community hopes for a speedy recovery.

With the visit of FHSU student intern Kelly Strecker and with the repairs of some transmitters from the May 2018 trip, this trip to the Blackstone radar introduced Kelly to more radar hardware and allowed the installation of the transmitters. The goal with the transmitters was to get all of them firing as all of the antennas were repaired earlier in the year. With the two recently repaired transmitters, the radar was left running on all antennas at the end of this trip. However, two additional transmitters were found to not be running so these were brought back to the Blacksburg lab for repairs. These transmitters will be spares at the site once repaired and returned.

In addition to these items, a check of the electrical lengths along the coax and inside in the electronics was performed as gathering correct elevation angle data has become an emphasis across SuperDARN. The time delay was found to be close to previous values, with some small differences. This new difference will be reflected in the hdw.dat file for Blackstone.

On behalf of the Data Analysis Working Group chaired by Pasha Ponomarenko, Evan Thomas has announced a new release of the Radar Software Toolkit (RST). The new version is labelled RST 4.2 and includes a number of new features (see 'Read More'). Archives of RST 4.2 may be downloaded using these links:
https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/archive/v4.2.zip
https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/archive/v4.2.tar.gz
A citable DOI is again available for this version of the software (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1403226) and updated documentation is available at the link below:
https://superdarn.github.io/rst/
Many thanks to those who contributed to this new release: P. V. Ponomarenko (our WG chair), D. D. Billett, E. C. Bland, A. G. Burrell, K. Kotyk, A. S. Reimer, M. Schmidt, S. G. Shepherd, K. T. Sterne, and M.-T. Walach

As announced by Mark Lester at the 2018 SuperDARN Workshop in Banyuls-sur-mere (France) SuperDARN PI Professor Jim Wild will give the 2018 Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) James Dungey Lecture. The presentation will be made at the Ordinary Meeting scheduled for December 14 at the Geological Society, Burlington House, London. Jim took his doctorate at Leicester University and is now Professor of Space Physics at Lancaster University’s Department of Physics. The RAS citation can be found at

https://www.ras.org.uk/images/stories/awards/winners/2018/James%20Dungey%20Lecturer%20-%20Jim%20Wild.pdf

Congratulations to Jim on this high honour!