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Meeting Planning Services

Announcement: October 20, 2020

Since our primary concern is for the safety and well-being of our community, the Ocean Worlds 5 meeting will not take place in 2020. Rather than risk conflict with AbSciCon and other meeting dates in early 2021, the OW5 planning committee have chosen to defer the next meeting until 2022. New dates will be posted on this website when they are available.

Meeting Location and Dates

New location and dates for the Ocean Worlds 5 meeting will be announced as soon as they become available.

Purpose and Scope

Many of the icy moons and dwarf planets in the outer solar system had the conditions to create and sustain subterranean liquid-water oceans for some part of their histories. These worlds may also have liquid water trapped within their icy lithospheres. In the larger bodies, fluids are also suspected to exist within and between lithospheric layers of high-pressure ice.

Both remote and in situ exploration of these worlds are under development. To support and complement these plans, the geophysics, chemistry, and ultimately habitability of ocean worlds can be investigated here on Earth. Analogue studies, field work, laboratory studies, and numerical models can augment our understanding of Earth’s systems, processes, and materials, which provide the foundation of ocean world behavior.

In this, the fifth meeting in the Ocean Worlds series, we focus on studies that utilize knowledge of/or access to our Earth to better understand non-terrestrial ocean worlds and/or advance our ability to explore these worlds with spacecraft. In addition to field-based analog studies, we welcome studies based on theoretical or laboratory-based experimental approaches to further understanding of ocean worlds. We also encourage participation from scientists who would like to identify or expand upon interdisciplinary pathways for their current projects. As with past Ocean Worlds meetings, a primary motivation is to engender cross-fertilization of ideas and expertise by soliciting contributions from the ocean sciences, astrobiology, planetary sciences, and technology development communities.

 

Note: All electronic submission forms are part of the Meeting Portal, which requires users to set up a personal profile to access our electronic forms (setting up a profile is quick and easy, requiring only a few minutes of your time).