Short Abstract

This Combined Format Open Panel addresses the challenges related to conducting activities on/around other celestial bodies - including robotic and crewed missions to the Moon, Mars, asteroids, comets, or Jovian moons - across three dimensions: 1) Exploration, 2) Resilience, 3) Future

Description

While most of the commercial and scientific activities in outer space remain bound to the Earth’s orbits, there is an ever-growing suite of missions that have successfully landed on other celestial bodies - from lunar robotic and crewed missions in 1960s/70s through Viking landers and Mars rovers to recent missions to asteroids, comets, or Jovian moons - or they aspire to do so in the near future. However, landing and conducting activities on another celestial body comes with a baggage of challenges, including political, legal, and ethical ramifications, as well as engineering and scientific concerns, or cultural, social, and economic implications.

This Combined Format Open Panel proposes to map them out in three dimensions that stem from the theme of EASST2026:

1) Exploration

We welcome proposals tackling ethics and policies of conducting scientific activities on/around the Moon, asteroids, comets, as well as other planets in the Solar System. We aim to profile the objectives and goals of various scientific activities on other bodies.

2) Resilience

We are particularly interested in parallels and feedback loops between terrestrial and extra-terrestrial sustainability, echoing Lisa Messeri’s notion of the "gestures of cosmic relations" or the emerging framework of "earth-space sustainability". This includes theorizing unified paradigms for earthly and outer space ecologies, lessons from nature conservation for planetary stewardship of other celestial bodies, and applications of outer space technologies on Earth.

3) Future

We encourage contributions that explore speculative, futuring aspects of earth-space sustainability in deep space and lunar environments (e.g. scenarios addressing economic, social, and cultural reverberations of extensive public or private activities in outer space, geopolitical challenges, impacts of major astrobiological discoveries).

The Combined Format Open Panel will consist of one traditional panel session, followed by a Roundtable between the panel’s convenors and guests from other outer-space-themed panels at EASST2026 (e.g. members of FUTURESPACE project or Leicester’s Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space).

Propose contribution