Europlanet Science Congress 2022
Palacio de Congresos de Granada, Spain
18 – 23 September 2022
Europlanet Science Congress 2022
Palacio de Congresos de Granada, Spain
18 September – 23 September 2022

Session programme

SMW

SMW – Splinter Meetings and Workshops

SMW1

PAPSSN Council Meeting

Public information:

The PanAfrican Planetary and Space Science Network (PAPSSN) is an Academic Mobility project funded by the Intra-Africa Mobility Scheme of the Education Audio-visual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Union.

The overarching objective of PAPSSN is to support the development of a skilled and innovative graduate students’ community and improve their job preparedness for the growing Planetary and Space Science labour market in Africa and foster their capacity of operating local infrastructure, generating local data and engaging with the international community of scientists and entrepreneurs.

The delegates from the 5 partner countries, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, SOuth Africa and Zambia, and representatives from the European technical partner (UNiversity of bologna, Italy) will meet to discuss future calls and activities across the continent.

 

The meeting will be mostly devoted to discussion of project business, nevertheless we invite colleagues in joining us from 16:30 for a Q&A session and for networking activities.

Convener: Fulvio Franchi
Tue, 20 Sep, 13:45–17:00 (CEST)|Room Seminar 8
SMW3

A Uranus Orbiter with probe has been recommended as the top priority flagship-class mission by the US planetary science decadal survey (2022), aiming to make use of Jupiter gravity assist trajectories in the mid-2030s. ESA’s Voyage-2050 strategy (2021) also recommended that international partnership missions would provide a key mechanism for European participation in the exploration of the Ice Giants. This community meeting provides a forum to discuss the decadal survey recommendations, and to consider the challenges ahead for realising this ambitious partnership.

Public information:

A Uranus Orbiter with probe has been recommended as the top priority flagship-class mission by the US planetary science decadal survey (2022), aiming to make use of Jupiter gravity assist trajectories in the mid-2030s. ESA’s Voyage-2050 strategy (2021) also recommended that international partnership missions would provide a key mechanism for European participation in the exploration of the Ice Giants. This community meeting provides a forum to discuss the decadal survey recommendations, and to consider the challenges ahead for realising this ambitious partnership.

The provisional schedule is as follows:

  • 12:00-12:10 Welcome and UOP Overview (Leigh Fletcher)
  • 12:10-12:20 Comments on the NASA Decadal Response (Mark Hofstadter)
  • 12:20-12:30 July Probe Meeting (Kathy Mandt)
  • 12:30-12:40 European probes (Olivier Mousis)
  • 12:40-13:00 Open Floor (All)

Please note that room capacity is limited to 50 people and will be strictly enforced.

Convener: Leigh Fletcher
Wed, 21 Sep, 12:00–13:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW4

Exoplanets is one of the few fields that amateur astronomers and the public can contribute significantly, with observations with small and medium scale telescopes.
Ariel is an M4 space mission by ESA and it will observe spectroscopically around 1000 exoplanets to further characterise the nature of exoplanets. In the case of Ariel, small and medium size telescope are valuable, in order to plan the observations as efficiently as possible. To achieve this, a good knowledge of the planets’ ephemerides is needed before the launch of Ariel in 2029. While ephemerides for some planets are being refined on a per-case basis, an organised effort to collectively verify or update them when necessary does not exist.

In this session, we will present the Ariel mission and will present the ExoClock project, an open, integrated and interactive platform with the purpose of producing a confirmed list of ephemerides for the planets that will be observed by Ariel. The project has been developed in a manner to make the best use of all available resources: observations reported in the literature, observations from space instruments and, mainly, observations from ground-based telescopes, including both professional and amateur observatories. To facilitate inexperienced observers and at the same time achieve homogeneity in the results, we created data collection and validation protocols, educational material and easy to use interfaces, open to everyone. ExoClock was launched in September 2019 and now counts over 600 participants, mostly amateur astronomers from all over around the world.

Agenda of the meeting:

- Giovanna Tinetti from UCL, Principal Investigator of the Ariel Mission
- Anastasia Kokori from UCL, coordinator of the ExoClock project
- Yves Jongen, active ExoClock observer
- Angelos Tsiaras from the Arceti Observatory, coordinator of the ExoClock project

The ExoClock project website: www.exoclock.space

Educational material can be found at: www.exoworldsspies.com

Conveners: Anastasia Kokori, Ricardo Hueso
Wed, 21 Sep, 15:30–17:00 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW5

This workshop will focus in the professional and amateur collaborations around the Juno mission and the coverage of the Outer Planets obtained by amateur observers over 2022. Juno's orbit results in perijoves around Jupiter separated by 43-44 days. Global views of Jupiter and its dynamic atmosphere obtained by amateurs serve to place the context of the unique views of the atmosphere provided by Juno. In parallel, during this summer the James Webb Space Telescope is due to observe the Outer Planets from Jupiter to Neptune as part of different observing programs now being scheduled. All of these observations benefit from context imaging of the planets close in time and around the JWST observations.

The workshop will host an open discussion with amateur astronomers collaborating in these two global collaborations and will count with speakers from Juno and JWST outer planets programs.

Conveners: Anastasia Kokori, Ricardo Hueso
Wed, 21 Sep, 17:30–18:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW6

The purpose of the Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) Town Hall is to update the community on OPAG activities and get community input for upcoming activities, especially in light of the new Decadal Survey recommendations and possible opportunities for international cooperation.

Convener: Jeffrey Moore
Fri, 23 Sep, 13:45–15:15 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW7

Evaluating the scientific and socioeconomic impact of research activities is becoming increasingly important for securing future funding. This challenge is complicated by the fact that research projects can cover many different types of activities in many different geographical locations, targeted at different audiences.

This workshop looks at how to develop an evaluation framework for your project or activity. Participants will be given an introduction to evaluation and an overview of logic models and their use in evaluation. As a practical example, the session will orient participants to the way the OECD Reference Framework for Assessing the Scientific and Socio-economic Impact of Research Infrastructures has informed the evaluation of the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure project.The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to supporting participants in starting to map out approaches to assessing their own projects, including and going beyond scientific impacts of activity.

You can pre-register for the session here (not essential), especially if you would like to take part in our evaluation “surgery” at the end of the session where we can discuss projects you may want to evaluate.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/epsc2022-workshop-designing-and-implementing-an-evaluation-framework-tickets-384425114867

Conveners: Jennifer DeWitt, Anita Heward
Wed, 21 Sep, 10:00–11:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW8

The splinter is intended to be a participative workshop with collaborative planetary data handling and analysis components using community-driven Open Source tools. Both junior and senior scientists willing to share expertise, tools, science use cases and issues are welcome.

See previous OP Data Cafe at https://github.com/openplanetary/op-data-cafe

Public information:

Tentative agenda/schedule

  • 15:30 – 15:40: Welcome & introduction (10 min)
    • The organisers introduce OpenPlanetary and the OP Data Café of the day.
  • 15:40 – 15:50: Agenda creation (10 min)
    • Round table (ice-breaker quiz? for example with slido)
    • Participants in the room can propose topics/activities in addition to the ones already proposed), and vote.
  • 15:50 – 16:45: Group activities (55 min)
    • Participants split up into groups around a table and start the chosen activity.
  • 16:45 – 17:00: Wrap-up (15 min)
    • All participants reconvene and each group quickly reports on the outcomes/findings from discussions/tutorials/hacks.
Conveners: Michael Aye, Angelo Pio Rossi
Thu, 22 Sep, 15:30–17:00 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW9

The EXPLORE project is organising a splinter meeting to present the project’s tools for Lunar Exploration and provide information on the EXPLORE Lunar Data Challenges.

Public information:

Agenda splinter:

17:30 - Brief description of the Explore project & Lunar SDAs - see Abstract & posters
17:45 - Live Demo
18:00 - Discussion, user feedback & further steps (e.g. discussion at GMAP community calls)
18:30 - Adjourn

Convener: Nick Cox
Thu, 22 Sep, 17:30–18:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW10

Planets in a room is a DIY low-cost kit you can use to build a small spherical projector to easily see, show and teach planetary science. Planets in a room was developed by the italian association Speak Science in collaboration with INAF and Roma Tre University. The project was funded by Europlanet Outreach Funding Scheme and is now distributed online at www.planetsinaroom.net

Planets in a room is also a community of people who love space and science and who choose to build and use this system to make their passion grow, involving new generations. If you are a researcher, a teacher, an amateur astronomer, a student, and want to enter the community, in this workshop you will learn how to build, use and produce original content for Planets in a Room.

Conveners: Federica Duras, Livia Giacomini
Wed, 21 Sep, 18:45–20:15 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW11

The scope of this meeting is to give an overview about the state of the art of our understanding of habitable worlds and to provide an unique view on this topic by a truly interdisciplinary team of researchers, gathered together under the umbrella of the European Astrobiology Institute (EAI). In particular, we will discuss possible ways to make further progress in finding the answers to the fundamental questions about habitability using a multiscale approach from the cosmological scale to the scale of a single planet.

Public information:

The scope of this meeting is to give an overview about the state of the art of our understanding of habitable worlds and to provide an unique view on this topic by a truly interdisciplinary team of researchers, gathered together under the umbrella of the European Astrobiology Institute (EAI). In particular, we will discuss possible ways to make further progress in finding the answers to the fundamental questions about habitability using a multiscale approach from the cosmological scale to the scale of a single planet.

Conveners: Ewa Szuszkiewicz, Ana-Catalina Plesa
Mon, 19 Sep, 15:30–17:00 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW12

The Diversity Committee of the Europlanet Society, in collaboration with WikiMujeres, Women in Red, WikiDonne, Wikimedia Belgium, and 500 Women Scientists is an on going project. The main objective is to highlight diversity within the planetary science community.

During this session, we will provide a basic training to start editing/writing Wikipedia articles.

The meeting is open to everybody, but if you wish to get additional information,
you can fill the form: https://forms.gle/xBXebPGSkD5AydPz6

Conveners: Arianna Piccialli, Lena Noack
Sun, 18 Sep, 16:15–17:15 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW13

Description: This workshop will be a hands on introduction on general Machine Learning methods for Image Segmentation for planetary applications. In this segment, we will tackle the problem of detecting mound like features in DTMs from the Mars Arabia terra. Mounds are positive relief like features which may contain evidence of water sources beneath them. Automatically detecting or segmenting them holds great utility. We will achieve this by training Autoencoder based models directly on elevation models, to learn appropriate representations that preserve the most relevant features, rendering them useful for downstream tasks. Techniques such as these are transferable to other input types such as RGB images, and thus serve as ground work for this line of applications.

Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.

Conveners: Sahib Julka, Ute Amerstorfer
Mon, 19 Sep, 10:00–11:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW14

This workshop will be an introduction of a machine learning pipeline to detect magnetospheric boundaries in spacecraft in situ data around Earth.
Planetary magnetospheres create multiple sharp boundaries, such as the bow shock, where the solar wind plasma is decelerated and compressed, or the magnetopause, a transition between solar wind field and planetary field. We present a pipeline using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify magnetospheric boundaries in spacecraft in situ data. The boundaries are identified by a discontinuity in a magnetic field, plasma density, and in the spectrum of high-frequency waves. These measurements are available on many planetary missions. Data from Earth’s missions Cluster and THEMIS is used for CNN training.

Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.

Conveners: Hannah Theresa Rüdisser, Jan Soucek, Ute Amerstorfer
Mon, 19 Sep, 12:00–13:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW15

In this workshop, we will introduce two of the open source tools we are developing within the Europlanet 2024 project.
MAPS is a tool for automatically calculating the apparent depths of Martian pits based on the size of their shadows cast by the Sun.
DeepLandforms is a toolset composed of multiple open source tools and based on Deep Learning algorithms to detect landforms.
We will briefly introduce a typical workflow to produce geomorphological maps in planetary sciences, mentioning the most common problems and difficulties.
Then, we will explain how Computer Vision and Machine Learning methods could improve the mapping workflow.
Finally, we will present with both MAPS and DeepLandforms with possibly a live demo.
The last section of the splinter session is dedicated to Q&A and brainstorming.

Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.

Conveners: Ute Amerstorfer, Giacomo Nodjoumi, Daniel Le Corre
Tue, 20 Sep, 10:00–11:30 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW16

A interactive presentation and discussion about MarsSI, the Martian surface service.

Convener: Matthieu Volat
Tue, 20 Sep, 15:30–17:00 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW17

Europlanet society Northern Hub public meeting and election

Convener: Jonathan Merrison
Wed, 21 Sep, 13:45–15:15 (CEST)|Room Splinter Sala de Prensa
SMW18

French hub executive committee meeting, discussion of actions since last meeting and upcoming actions.

Convener: Susan Conway
Mon, 19 Sep, 18:45–20:15 (CEST)|Room Seminar 8
SMW19

Regular meeting of the Spain+Portugal Regional Hub.

Convener: Miguel Angel Lopez-Valverde
Fri, 23 Sep, 13:45–15:15 (CEST)|Room Seminar 8