Peruvian Outreach Project CosmoAmautas Wins 2026 Europlanet Engagement Prize

A Peruvian non-profit that has turned classrooms in some of the country’s most remote communities into working laboratories for planetary science has received one of Europe’s most visible awards for science communication. CosmoAmautas, an association built and run by Peruvian astronomers, students and educators, was named the winner of the 2026 Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement, an honour that recognises individuals and organisations who have made outstanding contributions to bringing planetary science and astronomy to the public. The award, announced at the Europlanet Science Congress, EPSC2026, in The Hague, carries a cash prize of 1000 Euros and, perhaps more importantly, a platform from which the association’s model of teacher-centred outreach can be amplified across Latin America and beyond.

Dr Gabriela Calistro Rivera accepted the prize on behalf of CosmoAmautas at the congress and delivered a public lecture describing the association’s work, giving the international planetary science community a detailed look at how a volunteer-driven programme can achieve national scale in a country with pronounced geographic and infrastructural inequalities. In presenting the award on behalf of Europlanet, Thibaut Roger highlighted the association’s distinctive approach, noting that the organisation has demonstrated how rural schools can be supported to become places where planetary science and astronomy are not only explained but actively and sustainably practised, citing as an example the search for exoplanets using real observational data in the classroom.

The scale of what CosmoAmautas has accomplished since its founding in 2021 is considerable by any measure of science outreach. The association has trained more than 200 teachers across 21 of Peru’s 24 regions, a coverage footprint that spans the Pacific desert coast, the high Andean plateaus and the edge of the Amazon basin. Those teachers, in turn, have carried the programme’s activities to more than 10,000 students, and the association has supported the creation and operation of more than 80 Astroclubs, extracurricular groups in which school pupils continue to explore astronomy well beyond the formal timetable. This multiplier strategy, investing in teachers rather than attempting to reach students directly one by one, is the structural core of the project and the reason its reach has grown so rapidly with comparatively modest resources.

The pedagogical philosophy underpinning the programme is inquiry-based learning, an approach that positions students as investigators rather than recipients of facts. Rather than memorising that the Earth rotates or that the planets orbit the Sun, students in CosmoAmautas activities measure the Earth’s rotation and dimensions themselves, replicating in spirit the classical geometric methods used since antiquity to determine the size of our planet. They build and interrogate scale models of the Solar System, confronting firsthand the counterintuitive emptiness of interplanetary space and the true ratios of planetary sizes and orbital distances. They also analyse data returned by real space missions, an exercise that introduces them to the actual workflows of professional planetary scientists, from data cleaning and calibration to interpretation and error estimation.

Perhaps the most technically ambitious strand of the programme is its classroom-based exoplanet research. Using real data, students participate in the search for planets orbiting other stars, a field that has exploded since the 1990s into one of the most active areas of modern astronomy. The detection method most accessible to schools relies on photometry, the precise measurement of a star’s brightness over time. When a planet crosses the face of its host star from our line of sight, a transit, it blocks a tiny fraction of the starlight, producing a characteristic dip in the light curve. Detecting such dips requires careful measurement, patience and an understanding of systematic noise, skills that map directly onto the scientific method itself. By entrusting school students with genuine datasets rather than sanitised demonstrations, CosmoAmautas communicates something that textbooks alone rarely can: that cutting-edge discovery is not reserved for observatories in wealthy countries but is a process anyone with data, curiosity and guidance can join.

A defining feature of the association is its deliberate integration of Andean ancestral astronomical traditions into its curriculum. Peru’s cultural history contains a deep and sophisticated relationship with the sky, from the agricultural calendars of Andean communities to the astronomical alignments of pre-Columbian civilisations. By weaving these traditions into modern lessons, CosmoAmautas makes two arguments at once: that observing and interpreting the sky are deeply rooted in Peru’s cultural history, and that contemporary science is not a foreign import to be passively received but a continuation of a conversation Andean communities have been having with the cosmos for centuries. This framing matters for inclusion. Students who might otherwise perceive astronomy as the cultural property of distant nations instead encounter it as part of their own inheritance, a connection that educators widely recognise as a powerful predictor of engagement and persistence in scientific fields.

Gender equality and inclusion are stated core values of the association, and they shape how its resources are designed and distributed. The team has developed a range of teaching materials explicitly adapted to schools with limited infrastructure, a pragmatic acknowledgement that many Peruvian schools lack laboratories, reliable internet or even consistent electricity. The resources are linked to the Peruvian national curriculum, so that teachers can deploy them without sacrificing mandated content, and they are delivered through three complementary channels: physical experiment boxes, printed guides and online materials. The experiment boxes deserve particular attention as a piece of low-cost engineering in their own right, packaging hands-on activities so that a teacher with no specialised equipment can still run genuine measurements. The printed guides ensure that the programme functions where connectivity fails, while the online materials allow continuous support and updating for teachers who do have access.

The human infrastructure of CosmoAmautas is as distinctive as its pedagogy. The team is composed of Peruvian students and astronomy professionals living both in Peru and across the globe, working in all fields of astronomy and planetary sciences. This diaspora model converts the common reality of scientific emigration from Latin America into an asset, allowing researchers based in Europe, North America and elsewhere to contribute remotely to science education in their home country. Because the communities the association most wants to reach are underserved and often geographically isolated, its initiatives have so far taken place mainly online, a format that proved its value during the pandemic years and continues to offer reach at low cost. The organisation’s future plans, however, include in-person events, and the Europlanet prize funding will partially support this expansion into direct, face-to-face engagement, which outreach practitioners generally regard as uniquely valuable for building lasting relationships with schools and communities.

For Calistro Rivera, the meaning of the award is captured in the name of the organisation itself. Amauta means teacher in Quechua, the most widely spoken indigenous language of the Andes, and the programme is founded on the principle that when a teacher is empowered, the future of an entire community can be transformed. In her remarks upon receiving the prize, she described the honour as belonging not only to the CosmoAmautas team but to the wider community of teachers and students across Peru who have carried the programme’s activities into their classrooms, and she framed the award as an incentive to continue bringing scientific education and access to astronomy to more regions and more students in the country. That framing reflects a theory of change that has been validated by the association’s own growth: a relatively small core of professional and student volunteers, multiplied through hundreds of trained teachers, can achieve a reach that direct intervention alone never could.

The Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement, awarded annually by the Europlanet Society, exists precisely to spotlight work of this kind, in which the practice of planetary science is extended beyond research institutions into society. CosmoAmautas joins a lineage of recognised projects that have demonstrated creative, sustainable ways of widening participation in space science, and its selection signals the growing recognition within the European planetary community that engagement must be global and that the most effective models are often those built locally, in the languages, landscapes and cultural traditions of the communities they serve. With a national footprint already spanning nearly the whole of Peru, a proven teacher-training pipeline, and new funding to take its work into in-person settings, the association enters its next phase with a simple and compelling proposition: that the next generation of Peruvian astronomers may first look up from a rural classroom, guided by an empowered teacher, holding a box of experiments and a light curve from a distant star.

Subject of Research: Recognition of a Peruvian astronomy and planetary science education outreach programme through the Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement

Article Title: Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement 2026 awarded to CosmoAmautas

Article References: Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement 2026 awarded to CosmoAmautas. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: CosmoAmautas, Europlanet, science outreach, astronomy education, Peru, public engagement, exoplanets, inquiry-based learning, teacher training, Andean astronomy, EPSC2026, STEM education