The director and assistant director of the High Altitude Observatory (HAO), Michael Thompson and Steven Tomczyk, visited the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) during November 20 – 23, 2011 to discuss with Chinese colleagues about the joint development of the Coronal Solar Magnetism Observatory (COSMO) instrumentation, for which a letter of intent (LOI) was signed in May 2011. During the visit, they and Chinese colleagues from PMO, Nanjing University, Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology, Yunnan Astronomical Observatory and Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics reviewed the history and shared the status of the COSMO project. Participants also discussed the possibility to extend COSMO scientific objectives to including search for exo-planets and outlined near-future actions to push forward the COSMO project and the joint China-US engineering efforts towards the preliminary design review (PDR). Chinese colleagues presented the preliminary results of the site survey in west China for solar instrumentations. |
