21 Years of Europlanet
New Year’s Day 2026 is Europlanet’s 21st birthday. To celebrate, we highlight 21 things that Europlanet has achieved since its foundation on 1 January 2005.
- The Europlanet Science Congress
First held in Berlin in 2006, the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) is the largest annual meeting on planetary science in Europe and regularly attracts over 1200 participants. Its interdisciplinary, interactive and adaptive format makes EPSC an ideal place for the global planetary community to share ideas and build new connections. Joint meetings with the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) and the European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA) have brought together even bigger international and cross-disciplinary audiences, with the recent EPSC-DPS2025 in Helskinki becoming the largest planetary meeting to date in Europe with 1800 participants.
- Research and Technology Infrastructure
Europlanet provides access to state-of-the-art research and technology infrastructure (RTI) to support planetary science and space exploration. The distributed RTI includes facilities for the simulation of planetary environments, analysis of planetary samples, testing and development of space technologies, and support of interdisciplinary studies. Our Transnational Access (TA) programme is designed to allow researchers from anywhere in the world, and at all career stages, to have access to facilities to support scientific and technological excellence in planetary/space research and to foster international collaborations. To date, Europlanet has funded over 600 research visits, amounting to in excess of 5,500 days of access (15 years), involving over 800 individual researchers accessing 23 laboratories (with over 80 individual facilities), 12 planetary analogue field sites and 17 telescopes.
Applications for a new TA call will open later in January.
- Membership Organisation
Europlanet is a grass-roots organisation, supported by individual members since 2018 and organisational members since 2025. Membership benefits include discounted fees for EPSC, access to facilities, expert exchanges, webinars, training, workshops, funding schemes and much more. Join now to help us continue our mission to support the planetary community around the world.
- Europlanet Early Careers (EPEC) Network
The Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) network is organised by early-career researchers for early-career researchers, and includes volunteers from across the Europlanet international community. The EPEC network is open to all students, doctoral candidates and early-career planetary scientists and space professionals whose last degree (e.g. MSc or PhD) was obtained a maximum of 7 years ago (excluding parental leave, serious illness and similar delays).
EPEC’s activities, including Annual Week and EPEC@EPSC, aim to form a strong network between young professionals by organising early-career-relevant events and by engaging in different projects amongst different focus areas (outreach, diversity, early career support). As early careers comprise over half Europlanet’s individual members and attendees at EPSC, EPEC ensures that the (scientifically) young members of our community have a clear voice within Europlanet to shape the future of planetary and space sciences and engineering.
- Regional Hubs
Europlanet’s Regional Hubs support the development of planetary science at a national and regional level, particularly in countries and areas that are currently under-represented within the community. Our Hub Committees organise networking events and workshops to support the research community, as well as to build links with amateur astronomers, industrial partners, policymakers, educators, the media and the wider public. In addition to 10 European Regional Hubs, a Colombian Regional Hub was established in 2025 to support the community in Colombia and Latin America.
- Projects
Europlanet was founded as a Coordination Action funded by the European Commission (EC) in 2005-2008 to promote networking, support the sharing of resources and overcome fragmentation in the European planetary science community. Through a series of further EC grants awarded between 2009 and 2024, Europlanet has subsequently developed into a global distributed research infrastructure that offers coordinated access to services and facilities spread over 5 continents, supporting a community of thousands of users in academia, industry and in the wider community. In total, the EC has invested €28 million in Europlanet to support the planetary community.
Europlanet has received funding from the European Commission under Grant Numbers 871149, 654208, 228319 and RICA-CT-2004-001637.
- VESPA
VESPA (Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access) is a web-based search interface to identify and access planetary science and heliophysics data provided by the science community. Developed through EC-funded Europlanet projects, and hosted and maintained by the Observatory of Paris, VESPA is freely available to researchers and the general public. The VESPA portal supports user-friendly searching on metadata associated with generic observation conditions (such as target, instrument, time/space/spectral coverages, illumination conditions, etc) and metadata specific to each dataset (such as instrumental parameters) via the EPN-TAP protocol, which is now a standard of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) for Solar system data. Nearly 250 EPN-TAP data services of various size are declared in the IVOA registry, of which 94 are currently validated and accessible via the portal – including ESA’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA). VESPA also offers an easy solution for small teams to share newly-derived data from a publication or a research project.
- SPIDER
Europlanet’s SPIDER Planetary Space Weather Services provide contextual information on predictions and alerts for planetary space weather analysis and payload or spacecraft operations. SPIDER enables researchers to take advantage of data from a suite of missions at different points in the Solar System. Applications of SPIDER’s tools have led to several high-impact publications, and have been used to support planning of the BepiColombo and Juice missions. Opportunities identified through SPIDER for synergistic observations by BepiColombo during its cruise phase with the Solar Orbiter and Solar Parker Probe missions have also been implemented by ESA and JAXA.
- GMAP and Winter School
The Geological Mapping (GMAP) activity provides a complete infrastructure for the geological mapping of planetary bodies. As well as everything needed to create planetary maps, GMAP provides guidelines and insights on how to produce effective mapping products for scientific exploitation, as well as information on how to display and archive results in a structured way.
GMAP supports researchers who are interested in learning how to build their own mapping products, as well as mappers who want to learn how to incorporate other types of data analysis into their products.
One of GMAP’s major successes has been the establishment of the annual Geology & Planetary Mapping Winter School. Now in its fifth iteration, the Winter School provides training for anyone interested in planetary mapping to build knowledge and skills in planetary mapping. Participants can follow synchronously or asynchronously to accommodate different time zones. The 2026 edition will run from 26-30 January 2026.
Find out more or register now>>
- Europlanet Telescope Network
The Europlanet Telescope Network brings together medium and small telescopes to facilitate and coordinate observations related to planetary science. Founded in 2020, the telescope network has awarded 256.5 observing nights and supported 44 projects on planetary topics from near Earth objects to exoplanets, as well as astrophysical subjects including black holes and binary star systems. As well as supporting the professional scientific community, the Europlanet telescope Network has provided access and training for amateur astronomers to enable them to contribute to planetary research. Since the end of the EC-funded project, the Europlanet Telescope Network has maintained a list of telescopes willing to offer observing time to the community. The Europlanet Telescope Network currently unites 21 observatories with 32 telescopes in 16 countries.
- Webinars
Europlanet holds monthly webinars on a range of topics from science to policy, diversity and outreach. Quarterly webinars are also co-organised with the Science Team of the ESA Juice mission.
- Meetings and Workshops
In addition to EPSC and EPEC Annual Week, Europlanet organises a range of meetings, summer schools, workshops and training sessions to support the community. Our interactive online Teams Days, held 2-3 times per year, are an opportunity for the community to provide input and feedback into Europlanet’s strategy and operations. The Europlanet Research Infrastructure Meeting (ERIM) in 2023 comprised a series of interactive workshops with the aim of promoting collaboration across the Europlanet community. More recently, policy workshops organised in partnership with other research infrastructures have helped share information on upcoming opportunities and best practice for distributed RIs.
In total, over the past two decades, Europlanet has provided training for over 7,500 members of the planetary community, with a particular focus on early career researchers.
- Discord
Join hundreds of other Europlanet members on our Discord server to keep up with news, events, job opportunities and to connect with colleagues around the world. The server is designed with a variety of channels to facilitate discussions and interactions, including text channels, discussion forums and voice channels. We also hold regular informal catch ups and science discussion ‘hangouts’.
- Diversity
Europlanet is committed to building a diverse, inclusive planetary science and ensuring that individuals within that community experience equal opportunity, regardless of gender, disability, ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation, marital status, age, nationality or socioeconomic background. The Europlanet Diversity Committee acts as a strategic task force to advise, coordinate and champion activities across Europlanet that further the association’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusivity. As well as activities around EPSC, the Diversity Committee organises events to raise awareness of diversity, inclusivity and accessibility in the planetary community, such as through the Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon.
- Outreach
Outreach and education have been a core part of Europlanet initiatives since its foundation the early 2000s. Our objective is to support the planetary science community at a grass roots level to do more public engagement and educational activities, and to share best practice, training and resources to increase the impact of those efforts. Over 20 public engagement and education projects have been supported with more than 135,000€ of seed funding by Europlanet.
The Outreach Working Group coordinates activities, such as EPSC Goes Live for Schools, funding programmes, sharing of best practice and the annual prize for Public Engagement.
- Policy and Industry
Europlanet engagement with policy makers and industry aim to build collaborations and create synergies between cutting-edge science and the technological challenges of planetary science and exploration.
Europlanet has organised and participated in briefings, events, conference sessions (e.g. at EPSC) and other opportunities to engage policy makers in the European Parliament and the European Commission with planetary science, as well as engage with high-level representatives of ESA, NASA and other national and international space agencies. Organising events within the European Parliament has proved an effective platform to develop relationships with MEPs and other stakeholders, enabling the community to feed into discussions on future funding and policies relevant to planetary science.
Industry engagement activities have included organising technology foresight workshops, collaborations with space industry trade associations, developing contacts and networks within industry, participating in industry conferences and events, and convening industry and policy sessions at EPSC.
Europlanet’s distributed infrastructure offers industrial partners access to simulation and testing facilities for a range of environments that planetary and space missions may encounter through launch to their destination in orbit or on a planetary surface. By accessing Europlanet facilities, companies and SMEs can increase the value of their technology by increasing the Technology Readiness Level (TRL), understanding how instrumentation operates under realistic planetary conditions, or by identifying potential issues. Several of our RTI facilities are operated by commercial organisations.
- Collaborations
Collaborations stimulated through Europlanet, and involving its beneficiaries, have led to several successful proposals for new projects funded through the European Commission and national agencies. From the development of Machine Learning tools to mobilising researchers in Africa, these external projects act as multipliers for the impact of Europlanet in many different communities.
- Expert Exchanges
Europlanet’s Expert Exchange Programme aims to support the mobilisation of the planetary community to share expertise and best practice and to prepare new facilities and services for integration into Europlanet’s research infrastructure. The programme provides funding for short visits (up to one week) and over the last two decades, more than 200 expert exchanges have been supported.
Topics for visits have included training on the use of instrumentation, short scientific projects, improvements to facilities and the development of outreach collaborations. Evaluation of the visits show that bringing individuals together to exchange expertise often leading to synergies that would not happen otherwise, particularly for researchers from under-represented countries. The programme has also supported the professional development of early career scientists, helping them to prepare for careers outside academia.
- Funding and Awards
Europlanet offers funding and bursaries to support the community in various ways. Each year, we provide over 100 bursaries for early career and researchers from under-represented countries to attend EPSC. The Committee Funding Scheme offers grants of up to 5000 € to support the scientific, community-building and outreach activities of our members.
Europlanet recognises the contributions of the planetary science community through a range of medals, prizes and other awards. The Europlanet Medals, launched in 2025, honour outstanding contributions from individuals of three different scientific career-stages to the subjects covered by the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC). The Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement with Planetary Science is also awarded to individuals or groups who have developed innovative and socially impactful practices in planetary science communication and education. The EPSC Outstanding Poster Competition recognises the work of early career researchers at EPSC.
- Impact
Europlanet activities are evaluated against a framework of core indicators for assessing scientific, technological, education and training, economic, and social and societal impacts. Evaluation shows that the impact of activities to date have been particularly strong in the scientific, technological, education and training areas.
The 197 Transnational Access projects supported through the most-recent Europlanet 2024 RI project are expected to lead to over 300 publications and 400 conference presentations. Interviews and follow-up surveys show that over 90% of visitors are planning future collaborations with their host facility. In particular, early career researchers and students report that the TA programme provides them with opportunities – including collaboration and network-building – that would not otherwise have been available to them, thus accelerating their career development.
Upgrades to facilities have provided increasing support for local infrastructure and associated employment, and there has been at least one SME company that was developed as a result of the TA programme.
The new Europlanet Evaluation Unit now offers evaluation support and consultancy for external organisations that would like to develop an evaluation framework or implement an impact evaluation of their activities.
- Teamwork
Europlanet’s existence and continued activities would not be possible without the support of many individuals and organisations. In particular, we would like to thank our Executive Board, Committees and Working Groups for their huge investment of time and energy in making Europlanet a thriving and vibrant community. We thank our individual and organisational members for supporting us and participating in our activities. We are also indebted to the European Commission for funding over the years, as well as our project officers at the EC for their support, guidance and advice.
Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.
