The Rice Space Institute’s Center for Planetary Origins to Habitability (CPO2H) recently hosted the Inner Solar System Workshop. This event brought together approximately 80 researchers from 25 institutes across the U.S. and Europe to Rice University to share research and host discussions on accretion of terrestrial planets, Solar system formation and evolution, geochemistry and cosmochemistry of astromaterials and volatile delivery and planetary differentiation and interior-surface exchanges through time.
“We were incredibly excited to convene an exceptional group of researchers to discuss major open questions and recent advances in the field of planetary science,” said Andre Izidoro, the lead organizer of the event and assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice. “We look forward to the new collaborations, proposal opportunities and scientific advances that will grow out of the many insightful discussions during the workshop.”
Several Rice faculty members, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students were among the workshop presenters.
“I think one of the special things about workshops like this is that it allows for longer talks that, in turn, allow you to actually have interdisciplinary conversations,” said Robin Canup, a keynote speaker and professor at Southwest Research Institute. “The longer times allow you to give background to nonexperts. The onsite meals encouraged more conversation as well.”
“We received a lot of positive comments from the workshop participants. There seemed to be a need in the community to have a workshop like this one, where different subdisciplines of geosciences and planetary sciences come together,” said Rajdeep Dasgupta, director of the CPO2H and one of the organizers of this workshop. “We are happy that our center could play an important role in community building in this space.”
The workshop was funded by the CPO2H, Rice’s Creative Ventures Fund and the NASA CLEVER Planets grant.