Inspiring stories – Painting the unseen In this EPEC Inspiring Outreach Story, Mai Wada from the University of the Arts London tells us how she has been working with two early career astronomers to enhance our understanding of the universe. Painting the unseen is an effort to combine scientific data with art to visualise celestial objects, […]

A transit of Mercury will occur on 11th November 2019.  This is a relatively a rare event: the last took place 9th May 2016 and you’ll have to wait until 2032 to see the next one. How to view the transit There are plenty of ways to safely view the transit, both online and through public events with […]

Highlights from EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 1. The biggest Joint Meeting to date! With 1731 attendees, EPSC-DPS 2019 was the biggest joint meeting of EPSC and DPS to date, beating the records of 1532 participants in Nantes in 2011 and 1400+ in Pasadena in 2016. 2. Prize winners and talks. Congratulations to all the EPSC […]

Raising awareness of the effects of light pollution Among the various forms of pollution, light pollution is one of the least known but still has a major impact on our environment. The excessive presence of artificial light in the night environment affects animals and plants, influencing their growth, interactions and threating the balance of the […]

Gateway into Inner Solar System Discovered, Finding May Alter Fundamental Understanding of Comet Evolution A new study may fundamentally alter our understanding of how comets arrive from the outskirts of the solar system and are funneled to the inner solar system coming closer to Earth.  At the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva, planetary scientist Dr. Jordan Steckloff […]

Could Venus have been habitable? Venus may have been a temperate planet hosting liquid water for 2-3 billion years, until a dramatic transformation starting over 700 million years ago resurfaced around 80% of the planet. A study presented today at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 by Michael Way of The Goddard Institute for Space Science […]

Drones probe terrestrial dust devils to better understand the atmosphere of Mars Dust devils, small dusty whirlwinds, have been studied for decades. But, says Brian Jackson, an associate professor in the Department of Physics at Boise State University, the ability of dust devils to lift dust into the atmosphere remains murky. “When we compare theoretical […]

Studies of the cloud-tops of Venus by JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft show striking variety in wind speeds year-on-year and between the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres. The first fine-scale observations of cloud-top temperatures have also revealed a tendency for clouds to converge towards the equator at night, in contrast to poleward circulation seen previously in daytime […]

Venus Takes Centre Stage in October 2020 Observation Campaign Next October, Venus will be the focus of an international campaign of coordinated observations involving two space agencies, three missions and multiple ground-based telescopes and planetary scientists around the world. The collaboration aims to shed new light on the thick and complex atmosphere of Venus. Plans […]

EPSC 2020 in the Heart of Granada The European Planetary Science Congress 2020 will take place in Granada, Spain from 27 September – 2 October 2020.. Many thanks to the Local Organising Committee for sharing this video with us. We hope to see you there!

Comet’s collapsing cliffs and bouncing boulders  Scientists analysing the treasure trove of images taken by ESA’s Rosetta mission have turned up more evidence for curious bouncing boulders and dramatic cliff collapses. Rosetta operated at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko between August 2014 and September 2016, collecting data on the comet’s dust, gas and plasma environment, its surface characteristics […]

AIDA collaboration highlights case for planetary defence Surprising results from recent asteroid missions have highlighted the importance of testing planetary defence strategies in space, according to scientists participating in the joint ESA/NASA Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) collaboration. The unexpectedly large crater on asteroid Ryugu created by the JAXA Hayabysa2 impactor, together with the sand-like […]

Citizen science starts to reveal Lucy mission target, Orus Observations made with a telescope designed for citizen science has taken the first step in providing detailed information on a target asteroid for NASA’s Lucy mission. The findings were presented today at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva by Dr Franck Marchis of the SETI […]

‘Snow-cannon’ Enceladus shines up Saturn’s super-reflector moons Radar observations of Saturn’s moons, Mimas, Enceladus and Tethys, show that Enceladus is acting as a ‘snow-cannon’, coating itself and its neighbours with fresh water-ice particles to make them dazzlingly reflective. The extreme radar brightness also points to the presence of ‘boomerang’ structures beneath the surface that boost […]

Is huge volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io about to erupt this month? Volcanic eruptions are difficult to predict, but observations have shown the largest and most powerful volcano on Io, a large moon of Jupiter, has been erupting on a relatively regular schedule. The volcano Loki is expected to erupt in mid-September, 2019, according to […]

Age-old debate on Saturn’s rings reignited A team of researchers has reignited the debate about the age of Saturn’s rings with a study that dates the rings as most likely to have formed early in the Solar System.  In a paper published today in Nature Astronomy and presented at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in […]

2019 Farinella Prize Awarded to Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo Prof Scott S. Sheppard, an American astronomer working at The Carnegie Institution for Science of Washington, and Prof Chad Trujillo, an American scientist working at Northern Arizona University, have been awarded jointly the 2019 Paolo Farinella Prize for their outstanding collaborative work for the observational […]

ARIEL exoplanet mission celebrates machine learning challenge and citizen science launch ARIEL, an ESA mission to make the first large-scale survey of exoplanet atmospheres, has announced the winners of its first international Machine Learning Data Challenge and has launched a new project, ExoClocks, aimed at amateur astronomers and citizen scientists. The winners of the Data […]

Stony-iron meteor caused August impact flash at Jupiter Analysis of a bright flash in Jupiter’s atmosphere observed by an amateur astronomer in August 2019 has revealed that the likely cause was a small asteroid with a density typical of stony-iron meteors. The impact is estimated to have released energy equivalent to an explosion of 240 […]

Thursday 19th September, 12:15-13:15 CEST (10:15-11:15 UTC / 06:15-07:15 EDT)Akatsuki mission results, 2020 Coordinated Venus Observations and science at Venus Masato Nakamura (ISAS/JAXA) – Akatsuki mission update Takeshi Horinouchi (Hokkaido University) – Cloud-top wind observations by Akatsuki Takeshi Imamura (University of Tokyo) – Infrared observations at Venusian cloud tops Yeon Joo Lee (Technical University of […]