Message from the Editor

Richard Harrison, General Editor

Well, here we are with the first electronic issue of Space Research Today (SRT) Having been involved with the journal since 1991, I have to say that I am excited by this milestone. We can make full use of images and movies, have live links to source material, have no limits on pages and no concerns now about delays in postal distribution. As soon as each issue is completed by the editors, it can go online immediately, and it can be visible to a much wider audience than before. Having said all of that, I must make two points. First, I feel that we will probably evolve, in terms of content and how we expand on the advantages of being electronic, so you should expect some changes as we settle into this new mode–in fact, please feel free to suggest anything that you think may enhance the journal. Second, the change to electronic publication is not a simple step and I want to personally thank the Executive Editor, Leigh, who has engineered the change of format brilliantly. In addition, Leigh and I would like to thank Jean-Claude Worms for his enthusiasm and encouragement, and his drive to enable it to happen. Underlying all of this, despite the changes, is the same basic aim to report on and advertise COSPAR business and COSPAR people, enhanced by news on associated activities, meetings, news releases, and so on.

Returning to the point about our wider audience, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome new readers, and especially those that are new to COSPAR. I hope that the articles lead to you to an enduring interest in COSPAR and its activities.

We have a wide range of topics and geographical distribution in our articles in this issue, including a focus on Climate Action, with comments from our President, Pascale Ehrenfreund, on the UN-COSPAR symposium on space-based Earth observation supporting climate action, held in Vienna in February, followed by a detailed report from Ralph Kahn, chair of COSPAR Scientific Commission A, who chaired the Symposium. The issue also includes an article on NASA’s DART mission that successfully deflected an asteroid, and we continue our ‘extended abstracts’ of key papers published in COSPAR journals with a discussion on planetary landings with hazard avoidance, and on drug discovery for space radiation. We also review a new autobiography by a former COSPAR President, Gerhard Haerendel, whose career maps out the very history of our space research era. Among the meeting reports this time are COSPAR Capacity Building Workshops held in Chile and Morocco. This was not a complete list of the contents, of course, but for new readers it stresses the spread of topics that we have come to expect in SRT. Of course, anyone is very welcome to submit material for future issues; details on how to do this are covered in the Submissions section.