The 12th semi-annual meeting of the WFI Consortium was held from November 9th to November 12th. Once again fully in virtual space, the meeting was joined by up to 120 participants at the peak, representing the 23 WFI Consortium Partner Institutes, ESA, the German Space Agency DLR, Japan, the Czech Republic, and the X-IFU Consortium.

In a combination of plenary and splinter sessions, the latest news on the instrument and all of its subsystems were shared and discussed. Despite notable impact caused by restrictions relating to the pandemic, progress was reported for all critical development aspects of the WFI. A particular highlight was the successful vibration test of the optical blocking filters demonstrating that the very large and thin filter will survive the loads imposed on it during launch.

A special session was dedicated to discussing new WFI science ideas, including galactic ISM and hot haloes, cluster cosmology, extragalactic transients and new physics beyond the standard model.

The plenary session also included presentations by M. Guainazzi (ESA), A. Stefanescu (ESA), the X-IFU PI D. Barret (IRAP) as well as a summary of the Athena reference telescope performance (by R. Willingale, Leicester University).

The next consortium meeting is planned for April 2021.