Subcommittee annual report 2022

Annual report of the Subcommittee on Geonomy and Planetology for 2022.

Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), Section X (Earth Sciences) – Committee on Geochemistry, Mineralogy and Petrology (GÁK) – Subcommittee on Geonomy and Planetology

Officers

Chair
Kordos László, DSc in Earth sciences
Secretary
Bérczi Szaniszló, CSc in Earth sciences

Meetings

24 February 2022, Thursday

  1. Polgári Márta: Terraforming on early Mars (authors: Polgári Márta, Gyollai Ildikó and Bérczi Szaniszló)

    The topic is a chapter of a book published at the end of 2021. The title of the volume: Terraforming Mars (Wiley).

11 May 2022, Wednesday

The two main items of the meeting were book presentations by our chair Kordos László and our member Horváth András.

  1. Kordos László’s new book: Rudapithecus research – facts and tales.
  2. Horváth András presents the new book of Hungarian space research: Magyarország és a világűr [Hungary and outer space].

29 June 2022, Wednesday

  1. Hargitai Henrik presents the new edition of his Mars atlas (no. 37), the improved version of no. 36.
  2. Hargitai Henrik explains his plan for the Martian student atlas under preparation. He asks the members of the Subcommittee to introduce a topic each, linked to personal experience: what experience led them to start Martian studies. The submitted texts of 5–10 sentences and the related images will be discussed at a meeting in the first week of August.
    • Examples are given for Hungarian Mars-analogue field trips with Hunveyor and Husar rovers (cross-bedded sediment sequences, standing basalt columns, sharp pebbles), for meteorite studies, for rock-composition measurements from Mars orbit and with rovers on the surface, and for atmospheric studies with a meteorological mast.
  3. Vincze Miklós is compiling, with co-authors, a book on the life of our member Illés Erzsébet. The aim of the book is to give Hungarian schoolgirls an example when they start a career in science.
  4. Hargitai Henrik reports on sending volume 13 of the rewritten and re-edited Kis Atlasz a Naprendszerről [Concise Atlas of the Solar System] series to press: Folyadékok a Naprendszerben [Fluids in the Solar System]. The aim is again to keep in touch with the younger generations.

1 September 2022, Thursday

  1. Hargitai Henrik presents the new pages of the Martian student atlas under preparation. So far he has included four topics from members of the Subcommittee (one each from Polgári Márta, Gyollai Ildikó, Unger Zoltán and Bérczi Szaniszló).
  2. Kiss Domokos Dániel presents his new book on the Szádeczky family.

    Kordos László and Kubovics Imre also speak briefly about their own chapters and their memories of Szádeczky-Kardoss Elemér. Accounts follow both of the meeting (MÁFI, 2009) and of personal experiences with Szádeczky-Kardoss Elemér. The book was published in 200 copies. Under other business, many members also share their memories of Professor Szádeczky.

1 December 2022, Thursday

  1. Selmeci Áron: Material-utilising technologies for in-situ work on the Moon (the talk was organised by our member Vizi Pál Gábor)

    The speaker works at ESA, supervising young students with a first degree. He studies technologies for utilising materials on site (ISRU technologies), for extracting oxygen from lunar dust and for 3D printing with lunar dust. Astronauts last visited the Moon in 1972; to continue the exploration, the Artemis programme was created in cooperation of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japanese space agency (JAXA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). One of its aims is to make long-term stays on the Moon possible. One way to do this is the In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) method, with which astronauts would try to extract or produce the raw materials they need for life (e.g. water, oxygen, building material for lunar buildings [“moon village/moon base”]) from the lunar dust (regolith), which is available on the Moon in large quantities. In the talk he presented two experimental projects carried out as an intern at ESA. The first was the optimisation of the Fray–Farthing–Chen molten-salt electrolysis technology for oxygen extraction from regolith simulant. The second was the design, development, assembly and testing of a solar-energy/laser-based regolith (simulant) 3D printer under hypergravity conditions (1–4 G) in ESA’s Large Diameter Centrifuge.

Attendance at the meetings ranged between 14 and 20 people. Our member Vizi Pál Gábor repeatedly provided online viewing of the talks as well, so the size of the audience can only be estimated.

International and domestic relations and cooperation

Our member Hargitai Henrik won a Fulbright scholarship to the United States. Under the scholarship he is doing research at the astrogeology centre of the USGS (United States Geological Survey) in Flagstaff, Arizona, and is supplementing the International Planetary Map Database, built earlier with European funding, with American planetary map data. Once the database is complete, planetary maps made by European and American researchers can be searched uniformly by area, author and date, and compared. At present only the USA has a coordinated planetary mapping programme; European researchers – in the absence of a pan-European geological organisation like the USGS and of comparable activity by ESA – publish planetary maps “at random”, in various journals and with different methods, which makes further use of their results difficult. The research is linked to the efforts of the Planetary Mapping Commission of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) to establish a planetary mapping standard.

Publications and references