The Last Word: Europlanet Beyond 2024
Ann Carine Vandaele, President of the Europlanet Society, and Nigel Mason, Coordinator of the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) reveal a new phase for Europlanet.
Read article in the fully formatted PDF of the Europlanet Magazine.
Next year, we will celebrate 20 years of Europlanet. We have come a long way since our first networking activities in 2005, with milestones that include the launch of our research infrastructure in 2009 and the launch of our membership society in 2018.
Over recent months, we have been building on the input our community contributed to a roadmapping exercise, as well as professional evaluation of the Europlanet 2024 RI project, to create a sustainability plan that will enable Europlanet to continue its activities, independent of funding from the European Commission.
Evaluation of the impact of Europlanet shows that the access we provide to facilities and expertise through mobility programmes, expert exchanges and networking activities leads to science that would not otherwise have taken place. With your support, we will be able to keep doing this for decades and generations to come. We are delighted to announce that our next step will be to launch a new organisational membership programme.
Through Europlanet AISBL, the not-for-profit association we established in 2023, we aim to offer access to the research infrastructure services we have developed and optimised over nearly 20 years, with opportunities for new facilities and services to join an expanded Europlanet network. Income from the new organisational memberships, together with our individual membership programmes and profits from EPSC, will enable us to support the community through programmes that include:
Mobility & Access
- Access visits to laboratories and field sites.*
- Virtual access to laboratories and telescopes.
- Expert exchange visits.
* Support will initially include travel, accommodation and subsistence costs, with service costs covered as the programme matures. It should be noted that the amount of access and visits will naturally scale with the number of organisations participating in Europlanet AISBL.
Community Services
- Webinars on a range of topics (e.g. science, missions and professional development)
- Engagement with policy, industry, media and public stakeholders
- Community funding schemes
- Bursaries
- Prizes
- ‘Europlanet Sandbox’ proposal brainstorming sessions
- Regional Hub programmes
Training and Career Development
- Mentoring
- Summer and winter schools
- Europlanet Early Career (EPEC) Annual Week.
We are inviting our membership to review our proposals and to vote on the new organisational membership packages at the Europlanet General Assembly, which will be held on 10 September during the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) in Berlin.
We believe that these are exciting times for Europlanet and look forward to sharing them with you.
Find out more about the benefits and pricing for Organisational Memberships.
