›COSPAR Capacity Building Workshop

COSPAR (Committee for Space Research) is the organization that group together countries and scientists interested in the space activity.

Since 2001 COSPAR has been organizing Capacity Building Workshops to promote the use of data from space missions among the scientists and students, mainly in developing countries. Nowadays there are available several data bases of free access with data from several space missions that have not been widely used, mainly because of lack of knowledge on the existence of the facilities and the way to use them.

Due to the increasing number of scientists working on Planetary Sciences in Latin American this Workshop, with the support of COSPAR, will be devoted to the use of planetary missions databases. The purpose is to increase the use of data obtained from the planetary space missions and promote the collaboration among scientists. There is a large amount of data obtained from the space missions and some of them have free access. This Workshop intends to provide enough information to the participants in order to enable them to use the available tools to analyse the data.

This Workshop will be divided into Introductory and Planetary Missions data bases lectures, and the development of a research project using the data. We have already confirmed the participation of scientists from NASA, ESA and JAXA to give lectures about the scientific objectives of the missions and to give an advice on how to access and use the data. There will be some introductory lectures about the present knowledge of the Solar System, Solar System formation and the orbital dynamics of space missions. The participants will work with computers with INTERNET access in order to download and work with the data. They will define and carry out a research project using the space data. A preliminary report of the results of the project will be presented at the end of the Workshop.