Between April 24 and 26, 2018, the Erica research group -led by prof. Fernando Rull- attended the mars sample return conference (MSRC), an international congress organized in Berlin (Germany) by ESA (European space agency), NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and DLR (German Aerospace Center).
At MSRC, some of the main experts in the field of space exploration gave a series of lectures focused on exploring the operational and technical challenges provided by the outlining of an unprecedented space mission: collect samples from mars and return them to earth.
The contribution of the Erica research group consisted in presenting the latest progresses made in the framework of the Planetary Terrestrial Analogue Library (PTAL), a research project financed through the European Research Council in the H2020- COMPET-2015 programme (grant 687302).
The PTAL project represents an ambitious interdisciplinary work where the University of Valladolid collaborates with prestigious foreign institutions (University of Paris-Sud, University of Toulouse and University of Oslo) to develop an extensive multispectral database of natural and artificial terrestrial analogue materials.
In this context, the PTAL information system that UVA’s researchers are developing aims to become a cornerstone tool for the scientific community interested on deepens the understanding of geological aspects and processes that could have been occurred on Mars and other extraterrestrial bodies.
