[Astronomy] EPSC2013

So a new job, in a familiar department, at a university I know well, and in a city I lived in for three years. I've been there a week, so what could be more sensible than taking a week off to go to a conference! Ah, the life of a researcher. In fairness, I hadn't been to a conference for quite some time. I missed out on the large meeting in Canada that many of my colleagues went to, so my last one had been NAM in St Andrews.

So after traveling down to London last weekend for Proms in the Park, I stayed on to attend the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2013 at UCL. EPSC is a bit broader in scope than many of the conferences I go to, as it mostly focuses on Solar system planetary science, with a bit of exploration thrown in. Exoplanets are a relatively recent addition to the lineup, and for this year were mostly present in a dynamics/atmospheres capacity.

The EPSC 2013 logo is rather spectacular. (Credit: isar.cnrs-orleans.fr)

I did submit an abstract, and was awarded a talk at 4:30pm on the Friday afternoon. Not ideal, but I'll take it; it gave me time to work on the results for my talk throughout the week.

The conference itself was quite interesting. I saw a couple of quite interesting talks on dynamics that touched on my own work, and gave me some ideas for quick things to check out. But some of the best sessions I went to were those outside of my field. The session on CubeSats had some interesting ideas for using those small, (relatively) cheap satellites, including origami telescopes and a 'mothership' with a cubesat launcher!. Then there was the session on 'Newspace Entrepreneurs', which started as a bit of a shambles with lots of cancellations and a rearranged order, but turned out to be really interesting. Talks on the Google LunarX prize showed some of the frankly crazy ideas that a few of the teams have for their missions, whilst the speaker from the MarsOne project gave me a bit more of an idea for what that ambitious project is up to. Then there was the ession on the impact of ET discovery on humanity, which was exceedingly well attended and threw up some interesting discussion.

I knew very little about the LunarX Prize before this week, but I'm now itching to find out more.

There are some ingenious looking ideas amongst the teams' offerings. (Credit: spaceref.com)

My own talk went pretty well. There was a decent audience for that time on a Friday, but they were appreciative and asked some insightful questions. The other talks in the sessions were also quite interesting, although many of them were very much in the vein of my own and presenting preliminary results. Sadly I didn't get to talk about some of what I was hoping to, as after spending most of my spare time during the week working on it I still hadn't managed to get all of the results I'd wanted, and therefore hadn't managed to get the overall sample and trend analysis done.

As well as the science, there were lots of social and public events going on. I didn't go to many of them, which was a bit disappointing, but I didn't know about them before I arrived and had already made plans. The one thing I did attend was the conference dinner, which for EPSC 2013 was a little different to the usual affair. In fact it was on a boat, which cruised up the Thames from the Tower of London to the 02 arena and back again, in the process passing under Tower Bridge which opened for us. It was a beautiful sight.

Tower Bridge by night is really quite a pretty sight. It's not everyday it opens for you either. (Credit: David Brown)

Whilst I was in London I took the chance to catch up with some of my friends, both from Warwick and from St Andrews. It turns out that I know a surprising number of people in London; sometimes it seems that all of my friends move there after university! I organised it a little poorly, seeing four different people over four nights, but I had a great time and it was lovely to see them all again.

So that was EPSC 2013. I have to say that it was the longest consecutive period that I've spent in London, and after doing so I can see a little better why people want to live there. I'm still not sure I want to do so, but it's more tempting now.