ANNUAL REPORT 1998

General Information

Staff
Funding
International cooperation
Development of infrastructure
Results of activities

1. Staff

At the end of 1998, the institute's staff consisted of 136 full-time employees and 15 persons with part-time contracts or working in international institutions on scientific leaves. The institute employed 20 senior scientists, including 11 professors and 10 habilitated doctors, of whom 9 hold position of associate professors; and 29 persons with a doctor degree, of whom 22 worked as research associates.

In 1998, W. KOSEK was awarded habilitated doctor degree in technical sciences for his dissertation "Precise methods of forecasting and filtration applied to prediction and time-frequency analysis of changes of Earth rotation" by the Geodesy and Land Management Department of the Agriculture and Technology Academy in Olsztyn.

Various SRC scientists are members of the following international scientific organisations:

The following SRC scientists served in 1998 as elected officers in international scientific organisations:

Furthermore, four SRC scientists (B. Kolaczek, I. Stanislawska, J. Sylwester, and J.B. Zielinski) were official representatives of Poland to international scientific organisations.

2. Funding

The SRC budget in fiscal year 1998 was 8541.9 thousand PLN.
The budget structure was the following:

• basic allocation from SCSR - 2834.2 thousand PLN,
• grants - 2385.4 thousand PLN,
• contracts - 1259.5 thousand PLN,
• allocation for international cooperation - 255.7 thousand PLN,
• allocation for development of infrastructure 1211.0 thousand PLN,
• other sources - 596.1 thousand PLN.

SRC Staff Composition in 1998	SRC Funding Structure in 1998

3. International Cooperation

The specific nature of space research, namely a high level of complication of experiments in space and the limited number of countries having launchers capable of putting satellites on orbits, requires that almost all SRC activities be conducted in international cooperation. Since the experiments that the institute is involved in are usually performed in the extraterrestrial space, a joint work on collecting, storing, processing and exchange of data is unavoidable.

Presently, SRC is participating in the following programs of international scientific organisations:

Apart from multilateral international projects, in 1998 SRC was involved in cooperative projects and grants with 36 institutions from 16 countries:

• Denmark (Space Research Institute);

• Finland (Finnish Meteorological Institute, Geodetic Institute);

• France (CNES – Centre Nationale des Récherches Spatiales, Toulouse; Centre des tudes Spatiales des Rayonnements, Toulouse; Institute of Physics of the Earth, Paris; Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie d'Énvironnements, Orléans; and Observatoire de Paris);

• Romania (Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy of Sciences);

• Russia (Space Research Institute, Moscow; Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Wave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IZMIRAN), Moscow; Institute of Radio and Electronic Engineering (IRE) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Institute of Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Petersburg);
• Sweden (Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Kiruna);
• Ukraine (National Space Agency; Main Astronomical Observatory, Kiev);

• UK (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; Mullard Space Science Laboratory; University of Sheffield);
• USA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge; Center for Space Research, Texas University, Austin; University of Illinois; Space Environment Laboratory, Boulder; University of New Hampshire).

Another form of international cooperation is organisation of international conferences, symposia, meetings, seminars, and workshops; during the report year SRC organised or co-organised two international conferences:

• 6-th International Workshop on Interaction of Neutral Gases with Plasma and Electromagnetic Radiation within the Heliosphere, 18 March 1998, Warsaw.

At the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Spring Meeting (Boston, USA, 26 – 29 May, 1998) Professor Barbara Kolaczek was a vice-chairman of the Session G21-22 "The impact of El Nino and other low-frequency signals on Earth rotation and global Earth system parameters" and docent W. Macek was chairman of the session ST6/NP1 "Nonlinear dynamics in the heliosphere" during the XXIII General Assembly of the European Geophysical Society held in Nice (France) from 20 till 24 April 1998. Five SRC scientists served as chairpersons of 6 sessions at various scientific conferences.

During the report year, SRC employees paid 229 visits to international institutions (including 13 stays over 3 weeks long) and accepted 115 international visitors (including 7 staying longer than 1 month).

4. Development of infrastructure

Space Research Centre PAS is located in three sites:

The main part of the institute's library is located in the Warsaw facilities and its auxiliary departments in the Heliophysics Division in Wrocław and in the Astrogeodynamical Observatory in Borowiec. At the end of 1998, the library had 13720 books and subscribed to 99 international and 72 Polish scientific journals. The library catalogues in Warsaw and in Borowiec are computerised and are accessible on-line in the computer system of the institute.

Staff Exchange with International Institutions in 1998

Since 1994 SRC has been operating a local area network connected to the Internet. The network is based on three workstations and several PC computers working as file and application servers; about 100 PC and workstation computers are connected as clients. The SRC LAN is connected to the Internet through a router and fibre optic cable with the bandwidth 2 MBs. Remote users can connect through a modem (48-22) 851-11-63. The computer system provides the following services: telnet, FTP, WWW. Also available by a dial-up connection is the catalogue of the institute's library. The servers are running different dialects of the Unix operating system.

The remote divisions of the institute in Wrocław and Borowiec are connected through the Internet. In 1998, deployment of the LAN in the Wrocław division was completed.

The network includes:

The cabling of the network is Ethernet fibre-optic. The network is connected to the Wroclaw metropolitan WASK network by a fibre FDDI connection.

5. Results

Main results of SRC activities show up as scientific publications the majority of which is published in international journals from the so-called Philadelphia list (e.g. Advances in Space Research, Astronomy & amp; Astrophysics, Icarus, Journal of Geodesy, Journal of Geophysical Research, Planetary and Space Science). SRC publishes its own periodical Artificial Satellites, presenting papers mainly on geodesy (in 1998, there appeared 2 issues of Volume 33). Many papers written by scientists from SRC are issued as preprints and internal reports before publication.

In 1998, the SRC scientists published 94 papers in international scientific journals, 19 in other periodicals, and submitted for publication 75 papers. The list of publications is included in Chapter VI of this report. Apart from the papers, SRC scientists delivered 145 talks at international scientific conferences (including 12 invited; for a review see the list in Chapter VII).

An important part of the institute's activity is construction of hardware elements for space experiments on rockets, satellites, and interplanetary probes and for support of ground-based research work. The most important pieces are discussed in Chapter III, and some of them are shown in photographs. On April 19, and on September 21 and 28, 1998, three rocket payloads were launched from the Trirandrum, India, range. They were part of an Indian-German research campaign to study equatorial region of the ionosphere. The payload included antenna systems developed in SRC under contract with the DLR (Germany).

In 1998 the institute worked on 40 projects sponsored by SCSR (including one solicited project), 6 international and 16 national projects. SRC scientists submitted 22 grant applications to SCSR (for XVI and XVII bids; see the list in Chapter VIII).
During the report year the institute organised 2 international conferences (see list in subsection 3).
In 1998 the formal status of SRC was raised to full institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The Centre obtained the right to grant Ph.D. in physics, specialisation of geophysics.

The logo of the Indian-German ionospheric research campaign during which a SRC-built hardware was used. The SRC acronym at the logo stands for the Space Research Centre.