Thursday 13 January 2011

2011 - A Busy New Year for Europlanet!

Europlanet has a busy time coming up in early 2011.  Starting on Monday 17th January, Europlanet will be holding a workshop at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden on landing sites for exploration missions.  Sixty scientists from around the world will be attending. The process by which landing sites are selected for such missions typically involves collaboration between people with diverse expertise and backgrounds, both in science and engineering.  Delegates to the workshop will run simplified simulated landing site selection procedures to explore and test a variety of relevant tools. The workshop will be followed by a short conference at ESTEC on Thursday afternoon and Friday, where the workshop results will be presented and there will be further key-note lectures, discussions and debates.

On 2nd February, Europlanet will be co-hosting a dinner debate at the European Parliament where MEPs, members of the European Commission and representatives from the planetary science community and industry can discuss opportunities for Europe to play a leading role in planetary exploration in decades to come.

In March, Europlanet will be announcing the winner of the 2011 Prize for Public Engagement with planetary science.  In April there will be a spectacular field trip to test a prototype spacesuit at the Mars analogue site at Rio Tinto in Southern Spain...

We will be providing regular updates here from the Europlanet outreach team, planetary scientists and our network of outreach nodes.