This website is no more relevant for the FP7 framework.
Please go to the -> FP7 Europlanet website



 

EuroPlaNet co-ordinates activities in Planetary Sciences
in order to achieve a long-term integration of this discipline in Europe.

 

Europlanet was born from the initiative of a group of European scientists working on the Cassini-Huygens mission to saturne and Titan, a very successfull collaboration between Europe and the USA.


The European proponents, with full support from their US colleagues, realizes that, in order for Europe to take all the benefits from the investments in this mission, there was a need for the European Union to provide additional support to the European Planetary Sciences Community focusing on complementary areas : gathering more scientists from different horizons and disciplines to join in producing more science from the mission, helping to network the separate national efforts, and helping to develop a more unified access to the data of all kinds (space, ground-based observations, laboratory and simulation results...) whose synergistic use can amplify the science return.

 

The initial "core" of proponents was able to form a consortium of about sixty laboratories troughout 17 different EU member and candidate countries, all interested in various ways in joining their skills and expertise in support to Cassini-Huygens. This consortium submitted the Europlanet proposal to the European Commission in April 2003 as a "Coordination Action", in response to a call for proposals issued by the "Support to Research Infrastructures" action of the 6th Framework Programme.
It was finally selected for implementation in May 2004 and, following the successful completion of the negotiation between The Commisssion and the Europlanet consortium, started operating on 1 January 2005.

 

It received a 2 million euros budget for the four years of its existence under FP6. As all EU research networks, Europlanet is the result of a bottom-up process starting from the research laboratories and scientists themselves, who develop their project under contract with the Commission.

 

Europlanet organizes and coordinates a set of seven activities :

  1. Management : coordination of the various activities and contacts to the European commission
  2. Discipline working groups
  3. Coordination of Earth-based and Space observations
  4. Outreach strategy
  5. Personnel exchange
  6. Meetings and conferences
  7. Integrated and Distributed Information Service (IDIS)