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!

Yoshi Miyoshi (ISEE/Nagoya University) and Iku Shinohara (ISAS/JAXA) have announced the availability of Level-2 CDF files of Arase (ERG) data. Arase (ERG) is a mission to elucidate acceleration and loss mechanisms of relativistic electrons in the radiation belts during geospace storms. Collaborations with SuperDARN researchers are encouraged.

The particle, plasma, plasma waves, and electromagnetic fields in the inner magnetosphere are measured by the onboard instruments of Arase. The Level-2 CDF files of all eight instruments and the SPEDAS Plug-in modules to handle these CDF files are available at the ERG Science Center.

For a complete listing of links and a message from the ERG project team, click 'Read More'

Dr. Aurélie Marchaudon has announced that the “Planets, Environments and Space Plasmas” (PEPS) team of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) of Toulouse (National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS and University Toulouse 3 - Paul Sabatier, UT3) will host the SuperDARN Workshop 2018 at the Oceanological Observatory of Banyuls-sur-Mer (Occitanie, France) from the 3rd to the 8th of June 2018. The website is open for late registration until May 27. Workshop website: https://superdarn2018.sciencesconf.org/?forward-action=index&forward-controller=index&lang=en

A first version of the programme is online at: https://superdarn2018.sciencesconf.org/program/details

A new version of the radar software toolkit (RST) has been released by the Data Analysis Working Group and can be found on the working group's github repository as version 4.1. Some major changes come with this new version including the deprecation of the '-new' flag in favor of using '-old' for data formats prior to 20060701 (*.dat, *.fit, etc.). The '-new' flag will no longer work and may break processing if used, so please update any external processing code.

In addition, RST 4.1 comes with major revisions to the gridding and mapping software. This means RST 4.1 will no longer produce the grdex and mapex files that are found on the VT-SuperDARN website. New files produced with the RST 4.1 code will be called grid2 and map2. These new files retain much of the same format as grdex and mapex files but are being separated to distinguish between the major revisions in the gridding and mapping software. RST 4.1 does maintain backwards compatibility so grdex and mapex files should be read and plotted with the current code.

Lastly, RST 4.1 introduces fitacf 3.0 as an experimental option of processing rawacf files into fitacf files. The default for this processing remains with fitacf 2.5, but users have the option to process what we at Virginia Tech are calling fitacf3 files with the command 'make_fit -fitacf-version 3.0'.

For now, grdex and mapex files will be produced to the end of 2017. Grid2 and map2 files will be produced starting with the beginning of 2017, but could be extended further back in time as necessary. Also, starting with the beginning of Dec. 2017, fitacf3 files will be produced in addition to fitacf (v2.5) files. Some of the web tools found on this website have been updated to plot this data. For the latest on what is available in the VT database, please refer to the data inventory page.

Prof. Mark Lester has passed on the exciting news that Dr. Suzie Imber from Leicester University has won a BBC-sponsored contest entitled 'Astronauts: Do you have what it takes?' to receive a reference from NASA Astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield to be accepted into the ESA astronaut training program. Suzie is a graduate of Leicester University where she was advised by Prof. Steve Milan. She has worked as a Research Scientist at NASA GSFC and is currently Associate Professor at Leicester. Mark has passed on the following notes:

"Suzie Imber, who has made several contributions to the SuperDARN group, was selected as one of 12 contestants from an original pool of applicants of well in the thousands and reached the last 3 of the competition. In the final episode of the series it was announced that Suzie had won the competition. Many congratulations to Suzie!" Also see

http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2017-archive/september/leicester-space-scientist-proves-she-has-what-it-takes-to-become-an-astronaut

Yoshi Miyoshi (Arase/ERG Project Scientist) announced on July 31, 2017 that a web page for Arase quick-look data is now available. Click on *Read More* for details.
The ERG (Arase) satellite has now been in full operation since March 24.

The Exploration of energization and Radiation in Geospace (ERG) satellite mission was launched on December 20, 2016 with an Epsilon rocket from the Uchinoura Space Center on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The aim of the mission is to study Earth's radiation belts. Coordinated operations are planned with the SuperDARN radars. Shortly after launch the satellite was officially nicknamed "Arase", which is a Japanese word for a river raging with rough water and also the name of a river close to the Uchinoura Space Center.

Photo credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency