The PVOL database in Europlanet 2024 RI

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Hueso ◽  
Agustin Sánchez-Lavega ◽  
Jon Legarreta ◽  
Iñaki Ordonez-Etxeberria ◽  
Jose Félix Rojas ◽  
...  

<p>PVOL is an online database of amateur observations of solar system planets hosted by the University of the Basque Country at http://pvol2.ehu.es/ [1]. PVOL stands for Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory and is one of the data services integrated in VESPA: a large collection of data services integrated in the Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access services using the same data access protocol (EPN-TAP) [2]. VESPA is an integral part of the Europlanet 2020 and 2024 Research Infrastructures and PVOL is one of its most used services. PVOL accumulates images provided by more than 300 amateur observers distributed through the globe and currently contains more than 47,000 image files. Most of the data correspond to image observations of Jupiter (67%) and Saturn (22%), but PVOL contains also useful data from Venus, Mars, Uranus and Neptune and some smaller collections of objects with no atmosphere (the Moon and Galilean satellites). In this contribution we document future plans for the service which will be carried out through 2021-2023 and we show the scientific potential of the data available in PVOL.</p> <p>Future plans for PVOL include frequent observation alerts, integration in the database of navigation files of the images from the popular WinJupos software (ims files), addition of amateur spectra of the giant planets, and a search engine and new data service of Jupiter maps obtained from the JunoCam instrument on the Juno mission that will also be integrated in PVOL/VESPA. This will allow to perform combined searches of data obtained close in time from amateurs (PVOL), HST (queries of HST images are also integrated in VESPA) and JunoCam (new service).</p> <p>The science potential of amateur data comes from the availability of long-term data (PVOL contains Jupiter data since 2000 and Mars and Venus data since 2016), frequent observations (several daily observations of each planet close to their oppositions capable to cover complete longitudes of each planet) and high-resolution images provided by key contributors, with some of them capable to resolve highly-contrasted features of 0.05-0.10 arcsec. We review recent trends in analysis of this data from an analysis of scientific publications partially or highly based on data obtained from PVOL. We show that amateur observations remain as a valuable resource for high-impact science on modern research on different planets (3-5).</p> <p><strong>Acknowledgements</strong></p> <p>Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149. We are very grateful to the ensemble of amateur astronomers sending their data to PVOL. We are in debt by the quality of many of these observations and the regular observations provided by many of them requiring long sleepless nights and even longer days of detailed image processing.</p> <p><strong>References</strong></p> <p>(1) Hueso et al., The Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory (PVOL) and its integration into the Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access (VESPA). Planet. Space Science, 150, 22-35 (2018).</p> <p>(2) Erard et al., VESPA: A community-driven Virtual Observatory in Planetary Science. Planet. Space Science, 150, 65-85 (2018).</p> <p>(3) Sánchez-Lavega et al., The impact of a large object on Jupiter in 2009 July, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 715, L155 (2010).</p> <p>(4) Sánchez-Lavega et al., An extremely high altitude plume seen at Mars morning terminator. Nature, 518, 525-528 (2015).</p> <p>(5) Sánchez-Lavega et al., A complex storm system in Saturn’s north polar atmosphere in 2018, Nature Astronomy, 4, 180-187 (2020).</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Heward ◽  
Jen DeWitt

<div> <p>In this presentation, we will give an overview of the Europlanet Evaluation Toolkit, a resource that aims to empower outreach providers and educators in measuring and appraising the impact of their activities. The toolkit is intended to provide advice and resources that can be simply and easily integrated into normal outreach and education activities. It is available as an interactive online resource (http://www.europlanet-eu.org/europlanet-evaluation-toolkit/), as a downloadable PDF and as a hard copy (including a book and set of activity cards).</p> </div><div> <p>The toolkit has been developed over a number of years with content provided by professional outreach evaluators Karen Bultitude and Jennifer DeWitt (UCL, UK). Initially, a series of focus groups and scoping discussions were held with active outreach providers from the planetary science community in order to determine what they wanted from such a toolkit, and what sort of tools would be of most interest. A shortlist of tools was developed based on these discussions, with volunteers testing out the tool instructions once they were drafted.</p> </div><div> <p>The toolkit begins with a brief introduction to evaluation and steps to choosing the right tools. This advice takes the form of a series of questions to help design an evaluation approach and make the most efficient and effective use possible of limited time and resources.</p> </div><div> <p>The toolkit offers a choice of 14 data collection tools that can be selected according to the audience (e.g. primary, secondary, interested adult, general public), the type of environment and activity (e.g. drop-in, interactive workshop, ongoing series, lecture/presentation or online) or according to when they might best be used (during, beginning/end, or after an event). The online version of the toolkit includes a set of interactive tables to help with the selection of which tool is most appropriate for any given situation.</p> </div><div> <p>The toolkit includes descriptions and worked examples of how to use two techniques (word-clouds and thematic coding) to analyse the data, as well as some top tips for evaluation and recommended resources.</p> </div><div> <p>For some of the tools, case study examples include information about how the tools have been used in the context of an event, how data was actually collected and analysed and what conclusions were reached, based on the data gathered.</p> </div><div> <p>The Europlanet Evaluation Toolkit has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149 (Europlanet 2024 RI) and 654208 (Europlanet 2020 RI).</p> </div>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Erard ◽  
Baptiste Cecconi ◽  
Pierre Le Sidaner ◽  
Angelo Pio Rossi ◽  
Hanna Rothkaehl ◽  
...  

<p>The Europlanet-2020 programme, which ended Aug 2019, included an activity called VESPA (Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access) which focused on adapting Virtual Observatory (VO) techniques to handle Planetary Science data. We will present some aspects of VESPA at the end of this 4-years development phase and at the onset of the newly selected Europlanet-2024 programme in Feb 2020. VESPA currently distributes 54 data services which are searchable according to observing conditions and encompass a wide scope including surfaces, atmospheres, magnetospheres and planetary plasmas, small bodies, heliophysics, exoplanets, and lab spectroscopy. Versatile online visualization tools have been adapted for Planetary Science, and efforts were made to connect the Astronomy VO with related environments, e.g., GIS for planetary surfaces. The new programme will broaden and secure the former “data stewardship” concept, providing a handy solution to Open Science challenges in our community. It will also move towards a new concept of “enabling data analysis”: a run-on-demand platform will be adapted from another H2020 programme in Astronomy (ESCAPE); VESPA services will be made ready to use for Machine Learning and geological mapping activities, and will also host selected results from such analyses. More tutorials and practical use cases will be made available to facilitate access to the VESPA infrastructure.</p><p>VESPA portal: http://vespa.obspm.fr</p><p>The Europlanet 2020/2024 Research Infrastructure projects have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 654208 and No 871149</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Livia Giacomini ◽  
Francesco Aloisi ◽  
Ilaria De Angelis ◽  
Stefano Capretti

<p>Planets in a room (PIAR) is a DIY kit to build a small, lowcost spherical planet simulator and planetarium projector. Teachers, science communicators that run a small museum or planetarium, planetary scientists, amateur astronomers and other individuals can easily build it and use it on their own, to show and teach the Earth and other planets and to develop and share material with a growing online community. Having started in 2017 with a first version made using 3d-printed technology, PIAR has lately gone green, with a new wooden, plastic-free version of the kit. (http://www.planetsinaroom.net/)</p> <p>The project has been developed by the italian non-profit association Speak Science, with the collaboration of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the Roma Tre University, Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica.</p> <p>It was funded by the Europlanet Outreach Funding Scheme in 2017 and was presented to the scientific community at EPSC and other scientific Congresses in the following years. Today, it is being distributed to an increasing number of schools, science museum and research institutions. PIAR is also one of the projects selected by the Europlanet Society for education and public outreach of planetary science: in 2020, it is being distributed to the 12 Europlanet Regional Hubs all around Europe, to be used in a number of educational projects.</p> <p>In this talk we will review the state of the art of the project presenting a selection of educational material and projects that have been developed for PIAR by scientists, teachers and communicators and that are focused on planetary science and on planetary habitability.</p> <p> </p> <p>Acknowledgements</p> <p>We acknowledge for this project the vast community of amateur and professionals that is actively working on innovative educational systems for astronomy such as planetarium and virtual reality projects (both hardware and software). Planets in a room is based on the work of this vast community of people and their experiences and results. We also acknowledge Europlanet for funding this work: the project Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.”</p> <p> </p> <p>References</p> <p>Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., “Planets in a room”, EPSC Abstracts Vol. 11, EPSC2017-280, 2017</p> <p>Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., Capretti S., “Planets in a Room: a DIY, low-cost educational kit”, EPSC Abstracts Vol. 12, EPSC2018-254, 2018</p> <p>Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., Capretti S., “Planets on (low-cost) balloons”, EPSC AbstractsVol. 13, EPSC-DPS2019-1243-1, 2019</p> <p>Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., Capretti S, “(Green) Planets in a Room”, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22153, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22153, 2020</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Dotto ◽  
Marek Banaszkiewicz ◽  
Sara Banchi ◽  
Maria A. Barucci ◽  
Fabrizio Bernardi ◽  
...  

<p>The research about Near Earth Objects (NEOs) is a major topic in planetary science. One reason is the potential hazard some of them pose to human beings and, more in general, to life on our planet. Moreover, the physical characterization of NEOs allows us to put constraints on the material accreted in the protoplanetary nebula at different solar distances and can give us insights into the early processes  that  governed  the  formation and the evolution of planets - including the delivery of water and organics to Earth -, and into further evolutionary processes that acted on asteroid since their formation - such as collisions and non-gravitational effects.</p> <p>The “NEOROCKS - The NEO Rapid Observation, Characterization and Key Simulations” Collaborative Research Project has been recently approved to address the topic c) “Improvement of our knowledge of the physical characteristics of the NEO population” of the call SU-SPACE-23-SEC-2019 from the Horizon 2020 - Work Programme 2018-2020 Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space.</p> <p>The aims of NEOROCKS are:</p> <ul> <li>to develop and validate advanced mathematical methods and innovative algorithms for NEO orbit determination and impact monitoring;</li> <li>to organize follow-up astronomical observations of NEOs efficiently, in order to obtain high-quality data needed to derive their physical properties, giving priority to timely addressing potentially hazardous objects;</li> <li>to improve dramatically statistical analysis, modelling and computer simulations aimed to understand the physical nature of NEOs, focussing on small size objects, which are of uttermost importance for designing effective impact mitigation measures in space and on the ground;</li> <li>to ensure maximum visibility and dissemination of the data beyond the timeline of the project, by hosting it in an existing astronomical data center facility;</li> <li>to foster European and international cooperation on NEO physical characterization, providing scenarios and roadmaps with the potential to scale-up at a global level the experience gained during the project;</li> <li>to apply and guarantee continuity of educational and public outreach activities needed to improve significantly public understanding and perception of the asteroid hazard, counteracting the spreading of “fake news” and unjustified alarms.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Acknowledgement</strong>: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870403 (project NEOROCKS).</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Moroni ◽  
Anna Milillo ◽  
Alessandro Mura ◽  
Nicolas André ◽  
Tommaso Alberti ◽  
...  

<p>The study of the meteoroid environment for particles with masses in the 1 μg - 10 g range is relevant to planetary science, space weathering of airless bodies and their upper atmospheric chemistry. For the case of airless bodies as Mercury, meteoroids hit their surfaces directly, producing impact debris and contributing to shape their thin exospheres.</p> <p>Mercury is a unique case in the solar system: absence of an atmosphere and the weakness of the intrinsic magnetic field. The Hermean exosphere is continuously eroded and refilled by interactions between plasma and surface, so the environment is considered as a single, unified system surface- exosphere-magnetosphere. The study of the generation mechanisms, the compositions and the configuration of the Hermean exosphere will provide crucial insight in the planet status and evolution. A global description of planet’s exosphere is still not available: missions visited Mercury and added a consistent amount of data, but still the actual knowledge about the morphology of this tenuous atmosphere is anyway poor. The ESA BepiColombo mission will study Mercury in details, by orbiting around the planet from 2025. For this reason, it is important to study the planet exospheric density and to develop a modelling tool ready for testing different hypothesis on the release mechanisms and for interpreting future observational data.</p> <p>In this work we focus the attention on one of the processes responsible of the Mercury’s Ca exosphere formation: micro-meteoroids impact vaporization (MMIV) from the planetary surface. <span lang="EN-US">A prototype of the Virtual Activity (VA) SPIDER (Sun-Planet Interactions Digital Environment on Request) services is used as a Monte Carlo three-dimensional model of the Hermean exosphere to simulate the bombardment of Mercury’s surface by micrometeorites from different sources, as Jupiter Family Comets (JFCs), Main Belt Asteroids (MBA), Halley Type and Oort Cloud Comets (HTCs and OCCs), and to analyze particles ejected. </span>We study how the impact vapor varies with heliocentric distance and the high impact velocity of these particles makes them critical for the morphology of Mercury exosphere, demonstrating a persistent enhancement of dust/meteoroid at dawn, which should be responsible of the dawn–dusk asymmetry in Mercury’s Ca exosphere.</p> <p> </p> <p><sub>The <em>Sun Planet Interactions Digital Environment on Request (SPIDER) Virtual Activity of the Europlanet H2024 Research Infrastucture is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research </em></sub></p> <p><sub><em>and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.</em></sub></p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Erard ◽  
Baptiste Cecconi ◽  
Pierre Le Sidaner ◽  
Angelo Pio Rossi ◽  
Carlos Brandt ◽  
...  

<p>The H2020 Europlanet-2020 programme, which ended on Aug 31<sup>st</sup>, 2019, included an activity called VESPA (Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access), which focused on adapting Virtual Observatory (VO) techniques to handle Planetary Science data [1] [2]. The outcome of this activity is a contributive data distribution system where data services are located and maintained in research institutes, declared in a registry, and accessed by several clients based on a specific access protocol. During Europlanet-2020, 52 data services were installed, including the complete ESA Planetary Science Archive, and the outcome of several EU funded projects. Data are described using the EPN-TAP protocol, which parameters describe acquisition and observing conditions as well as data characteristics (physical quantity, data type, etc). A main search portal has been developed to optimize the user experience, which queries all services together. Compliance with VO standards ensures that existing tools can be used as well, either to access or visualize the data. In addition, a bridge linking the VO and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been installed to address formats and tools used to study planetary surfaces; several large data infrastructures were also installed or upgraded (SSHADE for lab spectroscopy, PVOL for amateurs images, AMDA for plasma-related data).</p><p>In the framework of the starting Europlanet-2024 programme, the VESPA activity will complete this system even further: 30-50 new data services will be installed, focusing on derived data, and experimental data produced in other Work Packages of Europlanet-2024; connections between PDS4 and EPN-TAP dictionaries will make PDS metadata searchable from the VESPA portal and vice versa; Solar System data present in astronomical VO catalogues will be made accessible, e.g. from the VizieR database. The search system will be connected with more powerful display and analysing tools: a run-on-demand platform will be installed, as well as Machine Learning capacities to process the available content. Finally, long-term sustainability will be improved by setting VESPA hubs to assist data providers in maintaining their services, and by using the new EU-funded European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In addition to favoring data exploitation, VESPA will provide a handy and economical solution to Open Science challenges in the field.</p><p>The Europlanet 2020 & 2024 Research Infrastructure project have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 654208 & 871149.</p><p>[1] Erard et al 2018, Planet. Space Sci. <strong>150</strong>, 65-85. 10.1016/j.pss.2017.05.013. ArXiv 1705.09727  </p><p>[2] Erard et al. 2020, Data Science Journal <strong>19</strong>, 22. doi: 10.5334/dsj-2020-022.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solveig Pospiech ◽  
Anne Taivalkoski ◽  
Yann Lahaye ◽  
Pertti Sarala ◽  
Janne Kinnunen ◽  
...  

<p>Modern mineral exploration is required to be conducted in a sustainable, environmentally friendly and socially acceptable way. Especially for the geochemical exploration on ecologically sensitive areas this poses a challenge because any heavy machinery or invasive methods might cause long-lasting damage to nature. One way of reducing the impact of mineral exploration on the environment during the early stages of exploration is to use surface sampling media, such as upper soil horizons, water, plants and, on high latitudes, also snow. Of these options, snow has several advantages: Sampling and analysing snow is fast and low in costs, it has no impact on the environment, and in wintertime it is ubiquitous and available independent of the ecosystem.<br>In the “New Exploration Technologies (NEXT)” project*, snow samples were collected in March-April 2019 to evaluate the usage of snow as a sampling material for mineral exploration. The test site was the Rajapalot Au-Co prospect in northern Finland, located 60 km west from Rovaniemi and operated by Mawson Oy. A stratified random sampling strategy was applied to place the sampling stations on the test site. The sampling comprised 94 snow samples and 12 field replicates. The samples were analysed at the GTK Research laboratory using a Nu AttoM single collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (SC-ICPMS) which returned analytical results for 52 elements at the ppt level. After applying quality control to the data, the elements Ba, Ca, Cd, Cr, Cs, Ga, Li, Mg, Rb, Sr, Tl and V showed good quality and were used in the final data analysis.<br>Geochemical data of drill cores were used to train a model to predict bedrock geochemistry based on the 12 available element concentrations of snow analysis. Prior to statistical methods, all geochemical data was transformed to log-ratio scores in order to ensure that results are independent of the selection of elements and to avoid spurious correlations (compositional data approach). Results show that snow data provide reasonable predictions of bedrock geochemistry for elements such as Ca, Cr, Li and Mg, but also for elements not used in snow data, such as Mn and Na. This suggests that snow can serve as a lithogeochemical mapping tool for potential geological domains. For the ore related elements Au, Ag, Co, and U the model provided predictions with higher uncertainty. Yet, the pattern of the predicted values of ore related elements show that snow can also be used to delineate prospective areas for continuing exploration with more sensitive methods.<br>*) This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 776804.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 166 ◽  
pp. 13013 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Abuselidze ◽  
Inga Gogitidze

Under the conditions of EU association, one of the important for Georgia is to create such tax policy that shall be agreeable and settled with the economic systems of developed countries. The efficiency of the tax system depends on the optimal tax policy, according to which highly available and modern standard-oriented business environment is created. In 2017, the Parliament of Georgia passed the reform of profit tax that is aimed to free the business entities from profit tax during the reinvestment process. All the above mentioned maintains the topicality of ongoing reforms in Georgia. The goal of the research is to identify the impact of the new tax system on the Gross Domestic Product, the stream of investments, stimulation of business, and the period, after which the results of the reform will be favourable for the economic. There are various researches and scientific publications on the given issue. According to the study, the reform will produce a long-term macroeconomic effect that will mainly aim to favour small and middle scale businesses. Liberal tax approaches are advancing Georgia’s investment attractiveness, reflecting an increase of investments. This work is based on Estonian experience presented in statistics and international studies. The information processed by experts and researchers helps us to evaluate the impact of this reform on Georgia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Suada Ajdarpašić ◽  
Gazmend Qorraj

This paper examines the educational system in South East Europe (SEE) within the framework of opportunities coming from the European Union, particularly Horizon 2020, a recent EU innovation and research programme. The specific goal of this article is to measure the impact of the performance of universities in South East Europe and the likelihood of obtaining EU programmes, specifically Horizon 2020 projects. The additional aim is to investigate whether high-ranking universities are successful in obtaining Horizon 2020 projects and, more specifically, if university performance is a significant factor in the success rate in obtaining Horizon 2020 projects. In order to analyse this phenomenon empirically, we compare the main public universities of South East Europe and consider their overall performance in relation to EU programmes obtained. The final outcome of the paper is that there is a clear relationship between the university performance and obtaining Horizon 2020 projects. Therefore, the high performance of a university positively correlates with a high success rate in obtaining Horizon 2020 projects for most of the universities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristian Carli ◽  
Francesca Zambon ◽  
Francesca Altieri ◽  
Carlos Brandt ◽  
Angelo Pio Rossi ◽  
...  

<p>The numerous past and present space missions dedicated to the Solar System planetary bodies exploration, provided a huge amount of data so far. In particular, data acquired by cameras and spectrometers allowed for producing morpho-stratigraphic and mineralogical maps for many planets, satellites and minor bodies. Despite the considerable progresses, the integration of these products is still poorly addressed. To date, no geological maps of planetary bodies other than the Earth, containing both the information, are available yet. In this context, one of the main goals the “European Union's Horizon 2020 - PLANetary MAPping (PLANMAP)” project [1] is to provide, for the first time, highly informative geological maps of specific regions of interest on the Moon, Mercury and Mars, taking into account datasets publicly available in the Planetary Data System (PDS) database [2].</p><p>Here, we show the results achieved during the first two years of the project by the PLANMAP “Compositional unit definition Work Package”. In particular, we focused on specific areas, such as Hokusai quadrangle (22°-60° N, 0°-90°W) and Beethoven (13.24°S- 28.39° S; 116.1°- 132.32°W, 630 km diameter) and Rembrandt (24.58°S- 41.19°S, 261.72°- 282.73°W, 716 km diameter) basins on Mercury, and the Apollo basin (10 ° –60 ° S, 125 ° –175 ° W, 492 km diameter) within the northeastern edge of the ~ 2500 km South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin on the Moon [3]. For this work, we considered the multi-color images acquired by the Mercury Dual Imaging System - Wide Angle Camera (MDIS-WAC) [3] onboard the MESSENGER mission and hyperspectral data provided by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) [4] onboard the Chandrayaan-1 mission. After data calibration and the instrumental artifacts removal, we have photometrically corrected the data to derive multi- and hyper-spectral reflectance maps, afterwards we defined appropriate spectral indices to eventually obtain the spectral unit maps of these regions of interest. In next step, we will integrate the spectral unit maps obtained with the morpho-stratigraphic ones provided by other PLANMAP work packages [5, 6, 7] to merge the information and finally retrieve geological units.</p><p> </p><p>This work is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research grant agreement No 776276- PLANMAP and by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) within the SIMBIO-SYS project (ASI-INAF agreement 2017-47-H).</p><p> </p><p><strong>References </strong></p><p><strong> </strong></p><p>[1] https://planmap.eu/</p><p>[2] https://pds.nasa.gov/</p><p>[3] S. Edward Hawkins III et al., 2007, Space Science Reviews, 131, 247–338.</p><p>[4] Pieters, C. E. et al., 2009, CURRENT SCIENCE, 96 (4).</p><p>[5] Brandt, C. et al., 2020 EGU General Assembly 2020.</p><p>[6] Ivanov, M.A., et al., 2018, Journal of Geophysical Research, 123 (10), 2585-2612.</p><p>[7] Wright, J., et al., 2019, 50<sup>th</sup> Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.</p>


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