Europlanet 2024 Highlights
2024 has been a transformational year for Europlanet, with the completion of the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) project and the full transition to become a sustainable non-profit association. Here are some of our highlights from the past 12 months.
December – Europlanet Enters a New Era
Over the past decade, work has been ongoing to create a sustainability plan that will enable Europlanet to continue its activities, independent of EC funding.
The first step was the launch of the Europlanet Society in 2018 to support the sustainability of networking programmes. Since 2023, the foundation of the Europlanet Association Sans But Lucratif (AISBL) has made Europlanet a sustainable legal entity. In December 2024, a new organisational membership programme was launched that will provide a solid foundation for a Europlanet research infrastructure in decades to come.
This new funding model will enable Europlanet to carry on core activities, including:
- Mobility programmes, with access to facilities, telescopes and expert exchanges.
- Training and mentoring of early career planetary scientists and the wider community, including the Planetary Mapping Winter School.
- Support for the community at a grass-roots level through travel bursaries, prizes and small grants.
- Sustaining and growing our community through EPSC, strategic partnerships and other activities in all regions of Europe and internationally.
- Ensuring the voice of the planetary science community is heard in important strategic fora in Europe and internationally.
November – Webinars
Europlanet hosts webinars on the last Tuesday of every month on topics ranging from careers to scientific techniques and services. In 2024, we started a collaboration with the European Space Agency’s Juice Mission team to host a new series of webinars (held on Fridays, once a quarter) with a special focus on Juice, its journey to the Jupiter system, and the science it will be doing during flybys and when it starts its main mission to study Jupiter’s icy moons.
Watch recordings of past webinars here.
October – Outreach and Education
Since its foundation almost 20 years ago, outreach and education have been a core part of the Europlanet community and mission. In 2024, outreach activities included attendance at Switzerland’s largest Comic Con, Fantasy Basel, the #InspiredByOtherWorlds arts contest, the Planets in Your Hand exhibition at the Berlin Planetarium (organised by the German Hub and EPSC2024 Local Organising Committee) and the Cosmic Interviews event at EPSC2024, where female students were offered the opportunity to talk to astronomers (organised by MINToring program at the FU Berlin and Lecturers Without Borders).
Find out more about Europlanet Outreach and Education
September – Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) Returns to Berlin
The Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) returned to Berlin for a third time from 8-13 September 2024. Established in 2006, EPSC has grown into the largest annual meeting in Europe for planetary science and has been hosted in nine different countries. The hybrid 2024 edition, hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin and online, was attended 1200 participants from 43 countries.
The meeting received 1221 abstracts, with 1183 presentations scheduled over 98 Scientific Sessions, including 693 orals presentations, 22 dissertation oral talks and 500 posters presentations.
To foster interactions, connections and potential collaborations among diverse Europlanet communities — including academics, industry professionals, policymakers, and communicators at all career levels — E-SPIN was a new thematic event for EPSC2024. The event focused on ‘innovation’ in planetary sciences, serving as a common thread across all these communities.
Outreach programmes included a public event at the Zeiss Planetarium, and EPSC Goes Live for Schools, which supported conference attendants to engage with schools in the Berlin area and online. The conference was sponsored by Freie Universität Berlin, the Natural History Museum of Berlin and the Space: Science & Technology journal. Bursaries for 128 early careers, researchers from under-represented states amateurs and teachers were supported through Europlanet and the International Commission on Planetary Atmospheres and their Evolution (ICPAE).
August – Europlanet Magazine Special Issue
A special compilation of articles about Europlanet 2024 RI activities from the last seven issues of the Europlanet Magazine was published in the summer of 2024. The first feature is a summary of the main findings by the project’s impact evaluation officer, whose role has been to assess the effectiveness of the RI for its user community. The articles that follow give more in-depth overviews of the project’s main activities, including Transnational Access visits to laboratories and field sites, upgrades to facilities, Virtual Access services and Networking Activities.
The Europlanet Magazine, established in 2021, aims to highlight the range of activities by the Europlanet community academic and industrial partners, and the wider planetary community. The next issue will be published in spring 2025. Read Issue 7 here.
July – A Wrap for Europlanet 2024 RI
The 31 July 2024 marked the end of the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) project. The €10 million programme was funded by the European Commission (EC) to provide infrastructure to address the major scientific and technological challenges facing modern planetary science and strengthen Europe’s position at the forefront of space exploration. With over 50 beneficiaries providing access to more than 40 facilities on 5 continents, as well as four virtual access services linking over 100 data services and catalogues, the project was one of the most complex and ambitious ever supported by the EC.
Professional evaluation of the project reveals that significant impact has emerged from the project in scientific, technological, training and education, economic, social and societal domains. Find out more.
June – A Month of Meetings
June and July were busy months for Europlanet, with participation in multiple conferences and workshops. Europlanet had a stand at the European Astronomical Society (EAS) Annual Meeting in Padova, Italy and the British Planetary Science Congress (BPSC) in Leicester.
The Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) Annual Week was hosted at the Università degli Studi di Padova. Across four days, 23 in-person participants and 20 online attendees networked and took part in workshops, talks and social activities. EPEC Annual Week is a great opportunity for early careers to make new connections, create collaborations and get to know the wider Europlanet community. This year’s highlights included sessions on planetary science in Italy and a group walking tour of Padova’s historic city centre.
The Europlanet Central Europe Hub’s Tatra workshop, held on 19-20 June 2024 at the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia, brought together experts and early careers in planetary and space science from across Europe for two days of presentations and discussions.
May – Transnational Access Visits Completed
Transnational Access (TA) is a cornerstone of all research infrastructure projects funded by the European Commission. By enabling researchers from one country to visit facilities in another, with all travel and service costs covered, the Commission aims to maximise the efficiency and quality of science produced, bridge the gap between highly developed and lesser-developed regions, support international collaboration and train the next generation of researchers.
Calls issued through the Europlanet 2024 RI project attracted a total of 323 applications. The Covid-19 pandemic caused serious disruption to the programme, requiring the EC to grant a six-month extension to allow facilities to work through the backlog of TA visits. However, of the 211 TA projects approved for funding, 197 were actually carried out, involving 293 researchers and 2077 days of access. The diverse science supported by the TA programme has led to several high-impact publications and new collaborations.
A new TA call will be issued in early 2025 and you can read all the TA publishable reports since 2020 here.
April – Virtual Access Services Highighted
A fleeting visit of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Venus revealed surprising insights into how gases are stripped away from the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere. Detections in a previously unexplored region of Venus’s magnetic environment showed carbon and oxygen accelerated to speeds where they could escape the planet’s gravitational pull. Europlanet’s SPIDER space weather modelling tools enabled the researchers to track how the particles propagated through the Venusian magnetosheath. The results were published in Nature Astronomy on 12 April.
Meanwhile, the VESPA Virtual Observatory for Solar System data ran an implementation workshop in Warsaw from 22-26 April to make six new services accessible to the community through VESPA. These included:
- A service to supports calibration, curation, archiving and dissemination of data from ground-based solar telescopes, provided by the Science Data Centre (SDC) of the Institute for Solarphysics in Germany.
- Ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC) fluctuation maps from the Space Radio Diagnostic Research Centre in Poland
- Measurements of Earth’s magnetic field anomalies caused by meteorite impacts, provided by the University of Warsaw in Poland
- British Astronomical Association Comet Image Archive
- A Student Science Club CubeSat Mission by the Rzeszow University of Technology in Poland
- Lunar Sample Spectroscopy Database (LSSD) from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India.
VESPA currently provides access to over 90 services in the VESPA Portal and over 290 in the IVOA registry.
Europlanet’s other Virtual Access (VA) services are also thriving, with a new Machine Learning Working Group on Discord and the GMAP Community GitHub.
March – Regional Hubs Get Active
Europlanet’s network of Regional Hubs grew in strength in 2024, with new activities and personnel. There was a new chair of the German Hub, Iberian early career prizes for theses in planetary sciences and exploration established by the Spain and Portugal Hub, a funding scheme issued by the Swiss Hub, as well as Europlanet sponsored sessions and meetings organised by the Central Europe, France, Ireland & UK and Southeast Europe Hubs.
February – Global Collaboration Through Workshops
Europlanet organised a first planetary science workshop in Bolivia from 6-9 January 2024. The workshop was over four days at the Institute for Geological and Environmental Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Geologicas y del Medio Ambiente UMSA) in La Paz, Bolivia. The purpose of the workshop was to provide tools for the processing and mapping of planetary surfaces, exploring different planets and analogous environments in Bolivia and Latin America.
The Bolivia workshop followed on from a Europlanet Latin America Planetary Science Workshop, ‘Connecting Earth with other Planets’, which was held in Buenos Aires from 31 October – 03 November 2023. Speakers were drawn from universities across Latin America and the Europlanet community, as well as the Argentinian national space agency (CONAE) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The workhsop stimulated many discussions and proved a very useful opportunity for networking and connecting local communities.
The Europlanet Workshop Series of events in Africa and South America was organised by the Global Collaboration and Integration Task of the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) project. We look forward to further collaborations with colleagues around the world in 2025.
January – GMAP Geology and Planetary Mapping Winter School 2024
The annual Geology and Planetary Mapping Winter School aims to introduce scientists and amateur enthusiasts to geological mapping of other planetary bodies. The fourth edition of the school ran synchronously (with live sessions) in the week 22-26 January 2024, and asynchronously (allowing participants to work at their own pace) on the Streavent platform until the end of February 2024. The focus of the 2024 school was geologic mapping aspects of Venus, icy satellites and small bodies. The programme was largely hands-on, with the inclusion of seminars and time for asynchronous interaction and individual or project mapping work. The school attracted more than 590 registrations from 75 countries around the world.
Each planetary body was introduced, with participants guided through hands-on activities such as the individual completion of a small mapping area. At the end of each day, specific time slots were dedicated to seminars, which provided insights, perspectives, and additional knowledge on related topics. The event was co-funded by the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) project’s GMAP teams at the University of Padova and Constructor University.
All materials and videos from the 2021-2024 editions of the Winter School are freely available, and registration for the 2025 edition is now open at: https://www.planetarymapping.eu
