Two of our team members went to the annual in-person meeting of ISSI Team #616, Multi-scale Understanding of Surface-Exosphere Connections (MUSEC), in Bern, Switzerland. Led by Liam Morrissey and Sébastien Verkercke, this international team combines theory, observation, experiments, and modeling to help us better understand how surfaces and exospheres interact on airless bodies like the Moon and Mercury.
During the week-long meeting at the International Space Science Institute, participants from North America, Europe, and Japan shared their latest scientific results and discussed ongoing and future missions like BepiColombo, MMX, and JUICE. The main focus was on connecting experimental and numerical studies across different scales, which is key to understanding planetary processes as they happen.
We presented the experimental setup for the VOLARIS project, showing the instruments we plan to use and the experiments we will carry out. In another talk, we discussed our modeling work on the lunar exosphere and how different physical and environmental factors affect our results. One of our master’s students also joined us, taking part in discussions about using Molecular Dynamics simulations to model how volatiles interact with surfaces and gaining valuable experience in international scientific teamwork.
The program also included a visit to the MEFISTO laboratory at the University of Bern, which is a calibration facility for solar wind instruments and has an electron-cyclotron-resonance ion source and vacuum chamber. The talks and lab visit gave us valuable input for our research and will help us further develop the VOLARIS experimental setup.
