High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility onboard China’s Spacestation is planned for operation around 2020. The HERD mission concept has been accepted as one of very few candidate facility scale scientific payloads. Its main scientific objectives are indirect dark matter search in space, cosmic ray spectrum and composition measurements up to the “Knee” energy, and high energy gamma-ray monitoring and survey. Its final selection is subject to the competitiveness of its scientific objectives, technical feasibility, and costs; It will be placed on the exposed and zenith-pointed platform of the Spacestation; It is provisionally allocated a total weight of about 2000 kg and a total power consumption about 2 KW; HERD is still in a very early stage of mission definition and only a very preliminary conceptual design is available for various Monte-Carlo simulations; Modest funding and manpower have been invested in China towards some technology R&D of HERD; HERD is open to international collaborations at all levels at the basis of no-fund exchanges.
The first international workshop on HERD will be held in Beijing on Oct.17-18, 2012. The main goals of this workshop are four folds: (1) discussing the scientific objects of HERD; (2) optimization of its mission concept; (3) expression of interests and possible contributions from partners outside China; (4) setup of the first international working group of HERD.