The winner of the 2025 TPS Best Paper Award has been selected. This year is the seventh year that the award is being given, and I am pleased to announce that this year’s winner is the paper “Space Plasma Physics: A Review,” published in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, volume: 51, Issue: 07, July 2023, pages: 1595 – 1655 (published online 23 November 2022).  This paper is freely available to all our readers and can be viewed at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9961153; the abstract is below.  The award plaques, certificates, and award checks have been sent to the co-authors by IEEE.  Congratulations to this outstanding international team of co-authors!

The co-authors of this tour de force are Bruce T. Tsurutani (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA), Gary P. Zank (Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research, and the Department of Space Science, The University of Alabama at Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA), Veerle J. Sterken (Department of Physics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland), Kazunari Shibata (School of Science and Engineering, Doshisha University, Kyotanabe, Japan, and also with the Kwasan Observatory, Kyoto University, Yamashina, Japan), Tsugunobu Nagai (retired, was with the Department of Solar System Sciences, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan), Anthony J. Mannucci (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA), David M. Malaspina (Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA), Gurbax S. Lakhina (Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, Navi Mumbai, India), Shrikanth G. Kanekal (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA), Keisuke Hosokawa (Graduate School of Informatics and Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan), Richard B. Horne (British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge CB3 OET, UK), Rajkumar Hajra (Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India), Karl-Heinz Glassmeier (Institute of Geophysics and Extraterrestrial  Physics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany),  C. Trevor Gaunt (Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa), Peng-Fei Chen (School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China), and Syun-Ichi Akasofu (International Arctic Research Center, Fairbanks, AK, USA).  

Abstract— Owing to the ever-present solar wind, our vast solar system is full of plasmas. The turbulent solar wind, together with sporadic solar eruptions, introduces various space plasma processes and phenomena in the solar atmosphere all the way to Earth’s ionosphere and atmosphere and outward to interact with the interstellar media to form the heliopause and termination shock. Remarkable progress has been made in space plasma physics in the last 65 years, mainly due to sophisticated in situ measurements of plasmas, plasma waves, neutral particles, energetic particles, and dust via space-borne satellite instrumentation. Additionally, high-technology ground-based instrumentation has led to new and greater knowledge of solar and auroral features. As a result, a new branch of space physics, i.e., space weather, has emerged since many of the space physics processes have a direct or indirect influence on humankind. After briefly reviewing the major space physics discoveries before rockets and satellites (Section I), we aim to review all our updated understanding on coronal holes, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, which are central to space weather events at Earth (Section II), solar wind (Section III), storms and substorms (Section IV), magnetotail and substorms, emphasizing the role of the magnetotail in substorm dynamics (Section V), radiation belts/energetic magnetospheric particles (Section VI), structures and space weather dynamics in the ionosphere (Section VII), plasma waves, instabilities, and wave-particle interactions (Section VIII), long-period geomagnetic pulsations (Section IX), auroras (Section X), geomagnetically induced currents (GICs, Section XI), planetary magnetospheres and solar/stellar wind interactions with comets, moons and asteroids (Section XII), interplanetary discontinuities, shocks and waves (Section XIII), interplanetary dust (Section XIV), space dusty plasmas (Section XV), and solar energetic particles and shocks, including the heliospheric termination shock (Section XVI). This article is aimed to provide a panoramic view of space physics and space weather.

Please refer to our TPS homepage for details about the award and for a listing of the previous awardees: https://ieee-npss.org/publications/transactions-on-plasma-science/.

Edl Schamiloglu, Editor in Chief of IEEE TPS, can be reached at [email protected]