First Planetary Science and Instrumentation Workshop

The WROONA group was designed in 2011 to strengthen the involvement of Poland in planetary geology, and contribute to develop the space sector through collaboration with Polish space engineers. A workshop bringing together the research scientists and engineers from the Space Researech Centre of the Polish Academy of Science (SRC PAS, CBK PAN in Polish) was organised in January 2013 to identify possible common areas where the scientific interests of the new planetology group meet the expertise of the SRC PAS engineers.

The WROONA group stressed the critical importance of accessing mountain terrains to retrieve key geological information on Earth and other Solar System bodies was stressed. At that time, brainstorming about a jumping planetary exploration platform was ongoing at SRC's Space Mechatronics and Robotics Laboratory, which has specialized in micro-gravity space systems over the years (penetrators CHOMIK on Roscosmos/Phobos-Grunt, MUPUS on ESA/Rosetta/Philae, HP3 on NASA/InSight) , following a hopper concept created by its lead engineer, Dr Jerzy Grygorczuk. The First Planetary Science and Instrumentation Workshop is the place where the Highland Terrain Hopper project was born (see the Hopter menu).

Workshop agenda

The ideas submitted by the WROONA group at this workshop

The workshop minute

Note that due to the success of this workshop (launch of the highland terrain hopper project!), a Second Planetary Science and Instrumentation Workshop was finally never organised as the workshop's objectives were fully met after the first one!