The ESA Heliophysics Working Group: building cross-discipline bridges to better serve the European Heliophysics  community

<p>Heliophysics, the science of understanding the Sun and its interaction with the Earth and the solar system, has a large and active international community, with significant expertise and heritage in the European Space Agency and Europe. Several ESA directorates have activities directly connected with this topic, including ongoing and/ or planned missions and instrumentation, comprising a ESA Heliophysics observatory or more musically, a Heliophysics Orchestra. More specifically in ESA: The Directorate of Science with mission such as Ulysses, SOHO, Cluster, Solar Orbiter, SMILE etc, as well as hosting the Heliophysics archive; The Directorate of Earth Observation with Swarm and other Earth Explorer missions, as well as the ongoing ESA-NASA Lower Thermosphere-Ionosphere Science Working Group (EN-LoTIS-WG); The Directorate of Operations with the Vigil mission, the Distributed Space Weather Sensor System (D3S) and the Space Weather Service Network; The Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration with many ISS and LOP-Gateway payloads and the Directorate of Technology, Engineering Quality with expertise in developing instrumentation and models for measuring and simulating environments throughout the heliosphere.</p> <p>An ESA Heliophysics Working group has been appointed by several ESA Directors, under the direction of the ESA Director General, to work on optimizing synergies across directorates, and to act as a focus for discussion, inside ESA, of the scientific interests of the Heliophysics community, including the European ground-based community and data archiving activities.&#160;</p>