The Europlanet Ireland and UK Hub is pleased to announce that the 2026 Research Visit Prize has been awarded to Holly Raynor, a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. The prize provides up to €1,000 to enable a planetary or space scientist to travel within Ireland and the UK to visit another institution for a research visit.
About the research
Holly’s PhD focuses on the operational capabilities of instruments aboard the Rosalind Franklin rover, with the goal of developing and informing future science operations for the mission. Using analogue samples selected on the basis of remote sensing data from Rosalind Franklin’s landing site, Oxia Planum, she plans on building a library of mission-representative data products that can be used to simulate day-to-day rover operations, helping to establish the best observational conditions for each instrument and understand how their data products complement one another. A key aim of this work is to quantify how the rover’s instruments overlap and enhance each other’s outputs, enabling flexible and reactive geological analysis within the mission’s limited resource constraints.
The visit
The award will support a visit to Aberystwyth University, where Holly will collect data from a set of analogue samples using the Aberystwyth University PanCam Emulator (AUPE) and spectrometers covering the spectral range of the Enfys instrument. PanCam and Enfys are both “survey” instruments mounted on the ‘head’ or ‘mast’ section of Rosalind Franklin, and are designed to characterise the geology of the landing site and guide target selection for drilling, making them essential components of science operations planning.
Holly said: “I will have the benefit of working directly with the Enfys team to collect Enfys-representative spectra of analogues, which ensures both instrument operation and data processing is in line with the planned workflows for mission data. Being able to collect this data at Aberystwyth ensures that mission-representative data products are as accurate as possible, improving the reliability of my cross-instrumental analysis and any derived operational recommendations.”
Aberystwyth offers a rare opportunity to access emulators of multiple Rosalind Franklin instruments at a single site for cross-instrumental sample analysis. Crucially, AUPE’s two Wide Angle Cameras (WACs) enable stereo imaging, which is currently a gap in Holly’s analogue data library, and provide an ideal environment to cross-validate data against existing training models. During the visit, Holly will develop her experience in operating PanCam and Enfys emulators first-hand, and build up a working knowledge of the current baseline of planned rover instrument operational procedure which will be enhanced by the data she collects.
Holly said: “This grant from Europlanet has enabled me to integrate Enfys and AUPE data into my cross-instrumental analysis seamlessly, providing an essential element of target spectral analysis that will complement my ongoing work with the PanCam and CLUPI instruments.”
