The Students As Planetary Defenders project launched in September 2023 with a deceptively simple premise: students should not merely read about astronomy but should practice it. Over three years, the initiative engaged more than 2,000 students and nearly 500 teachers across Europe and beyond in STEM activities centered on comets, asteroids, micrometeorites and planetary defence. Rather than relying on simplified textbook exercises, the project connected participating primary and secondary schools directly to professional research infrastructure, including robotic telescope networks, meteor camera arrays and international asteroid search collaborations. The result was a generation of school students who planned observations, retrieved raw data, performed calculations and contributed to genuine scientific workflows, all while their activities were woven into school curricula and astronomy clubs through a student-centred, project-based approach.

The technical scope of what these students accomplished is remarkable for any age group, let alone for secondary school. Working with robotic telescopes from the Las Cumbres Global Observatory network, students learned to plan astronomical observations, retrieve and analyse the resulting data, and produce their own astronomical images from professional-grade instruments. This is not a simulation; the Las Cumbres network operates research-class telescopes distributed across the globe, and the same pipelines used by professional astronomers to monitor transient events were placed at the students’ disposal. Learning to schedule an observation, account for telescope availability and instrument constraints, and then process the returned frames into scientifically meaningful images gave participants a complete end-to-end experience of observational astronomy.

Meteor research formed another pillar of the project. Using the PRISMA/INAF meteor cameras and their data, students calculated meteor trajectories and mapped meteor paths with the PASCAL software, the PRISMA All-Sky Camera Analysis Laboratory, to identify possible landing areas for the recovery of meteorites. The technique relies on triangulation: when a bright meteor is recorded simultaneously by multiple all-sky cameras at known locations, the geometry of the observed paths allows researchers to reconstruct the object’s atmospheric trajectory and, crucially, to narrow down where any surviving fragments might have landed. Students mastered this workflow themselves, transforming raw camera records into candidate fall zones. It is the same methodology that professional networks use to recover freshly fallen meteorites, and it demands genuine competence in geometry, data analysis and error estimation.

The project’s asteroid search component produced tangible discoveries. In collaboration with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, students analysed astronomical images to search for asteroids, and their efforts resulted in 72 preliminary asteroid discoveries. In this program, participants examine sequences of telescope images taken minutes apart, looking for the faint, slowly moving points of light that betray a previously uncharted object against the fixed background of stars. Each preliminary discovery must pass through confirmation pipelines before an object receives official designation, but the initial detection, the moment a student first spots an unknown worldlet drifting through the solar system, is real science performed by real observers. Seventy-two such detections from school-based teams represents a substantial contribution to the ongoing census of near-Earth and main-belt asteroids.

On the smallest scales, students collected and analysed micrometeorites through hands-on outdoor and laboratory activities. These cosmic dust particles, typically fractions of a millimetre across, rain down continuously onto Earth’s surface and can be extracted from suitable collection sites such as rooftops and gutters, then examined under microscopes and classified by their characteristic features. The work teaches magnetism, microscopy, classification and the physics of atmospheric entry in a single, tangible exercise. One student, Martina Maze, described simulating the collection of a meteorite with her science teacher Giulio Colombo and discovering how much invisible labor the process entails. Before actually doing it, she said, she did not realize all the work that went into it; once done, she realized that behind the search for a stone lies a whole commitment, since one has to recognize the stone and the meteorite itself, among many other things.

The recognition in Florence carried weight precisely because of where it occurred. The COSPAR Scientific Assembly, organized by the International Science Council’s Committee on Space Research, is the world’s premier space research conference, a biennial gathering where thousands of researchers present results across fields ranging from Earth observation and planetary protection to astrophysics and space life sciences. Presenting student achievements at the Opening Reception of such a meeting, and then sharing the StAnD experience with educators from around the world during the sessions of the COSPAR Panel on Education the following day, signaled that the scientific community regards this model of school-based research as genuinely significant. The students’ work also included the creation of a 2027 calendar featuring astronomical images produced through StAnD activities, a small artifact that encapsulates the project’s blend of rigor and accessibility.

Teachers were central to the project’s design, and StAnD invested heavily in building lasting capacity in schools. Educators were supported through a purpose-built Teacher’s Manual, an online MOOC and two summer schools, resources intended to equip them to deliver STEM topics through inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches long after the project’s formal conclusion. Tabea Mann, an accompanying teacher from Germany, highlighted how the project’s many components interlock: students can observe meteorites or asteroids with the robotic telescopes, then calculate through triangulation where they fall, and then search that area to see whether meteorites can actually be found. Giulio Colombo, Martina’s teacher, said the project gave him the opportunity to put knowledge acquired through the PRISMA project into practice at school, adding that he hopes some seeds have been planted and that meteorite researchers may emerge in the future thanks to this work.

Leaders of the space research community framed the students’ achievements in generational terms. Dr. Jean-Claude Worms, Executive Director of COSPAR, said that StAnD has shown that when students are given real scientific tools and mentorship, they become not just learners but contributors to the global space science endeavour. Rosa Doran, Chair of the COSPAR Panel on Education and President of NUCLIO, a partner in the project, said the students celebrated in Florence represent the future of space science, having demonstrated remarkable curiosity, dedication and scientific ability throughout the project. She expressed the hope that this recognition marks the beginning of their scientific journeys, and that one day the assembly might welcome them back, not as students but as researchers presenting discoveries of their own.

Behind the celebration stands a broad European partnership. StAnD was led by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy, with INAF’s Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino serving as leading partner, and brought together organizations working in astronomy, education and science outreach from Italy, France, Portugal, Greece and Germany: COSPAR, NUCLIO, Ellinogermaniki Agogi and FTP-Europlanet. Over three years the collaboration developed educational resources, teacher-training materials and practical activities designed to remain available to schools beyond the project’s lifetime, funded under Erasmus+, the European Union’s education, training, youth and sport program. As the project formally concludes, its legacy rests on a simple but powerful demonstration: space science is not merely something to read about. For more than 2,000 young people and their teachers, it became something they could actively do, and 72 preliminary asteroid discoveries, along with a cohort of students now visible on the world stage, stand as evidence that the approach works.

Subject of Research: Student participation in planetary defence research through the Erasmus+ StAnD education project

Article Title: Europe's young planetary defenders recognized on world stage as Erasmus+ StAnD Project concludes

Article References: Europe's young planetary defenders recognized on world stage as Erasmus+ StAnD Project concludes. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: planetary defence, StAnD project, Erasmus+, COSPAR, asteroid discovery, meteorites, micrometeorites, STEM education, robotic telescopes, PRISMA, INAF, space science education

The ACM conference series occupies a unique position in planetary science. Unlike meetings devoted to a single mission or technique, it deliberately bridges communities that often work in parallel: dynamicists who model orbital evolution over millions of years, spectroscopists who infer composition from reflected sunlight, laboratory analysts who study meteorites in the clean room, and observers who track the fleeting trails of meteors burning in the upper atmosphere. The triennial cadence means each meeting functions as a census of the field, capturing which questions have matured into consensus and which remain open. The 2026 edition in Poznań continued that tradition, bringing together current and future generations of small body scientists, with a scientific programme assembled by an international Scientific Organizing Committee and local logistics managed by a committee based in the Wielkopolska region.

A recurring theme of the meeting was the flood of high-precision data now arriving from next-generation surveys and space telescopes. Work presented in the session literature includes studies of trans-Neptunian and Centaur populations informed by recent survey discoveries, analyses of the orbital structure of near-Earth asteroid populations, and characterizations of active asteroids and main-belt comets whose dust tails blur the classical boundary between asteroids and comets. The increasing sensitivity of ground-based facilities has pushed detections toward smaller and fainter objects, revealing populations that were statistically invisible a generation ago. For dynamicists, this means models of impact flux, delivery from the main belt and the Kuiper belt, and resonant transport can now be tested against observed size-frequency distributions rather than fitted to sparse catalogs.

Cometary science featured prominently, reflecting the maturation of remote sensing at unprecedented spatial resolution. Research discussed at the conference included observations of cometary activity captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, which has begun resolving the distributions of water, carbon dioxide and other volatiles within cometary comae, and studies of long-period comets making their first pass through the inner Solar System. These measurements bear directly on questions of where comets formed and how the primordial ice inventory of the outer disk was distributed during the giant planets’ migration. Compositional mapping of individual comets, combined with the in situ results from the Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is converging on a picture in which comets are heterogeneous aggregates assembled from material processed at different distances from the young Sun.

Planetary defence was another major strand of the programme, and one with particular urgency following the first deliberate alteration of an asteroid’s orbit. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test demonstrated that a kinetic impactor can measurably change the trajectory of a satellite asteroid, and follow-up work on the ejecta dynamics, momentum transfer efficiency and structural response of the target Dimorphos has reshaped how researchers model asteroid interiors. Presentations at ACM 2026 drew on this legacy as the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft travels toward the Didymos system to survey the impact outcome in detail. Related work on the physical properties of rubble-pile asteroids, their cohesion, porosity and rotational failure modes, informs both deflection planning and the broader understanding of how small bodies evolve through collisions and spin-up over Solar System history.

Meteor science, the third pillar of the conference’s remit, is undergoing its own quiet revolution driven by global camera networks and seismic monitoring. Modern fireball networks now triangulate meteoroid trajectories with sufficient precision to recover falls and compute pre-impact orbits, linking meteorites directly to their source regions in the main belt. Studies presented in the meeting literature include analyses of meteoroid fragmentation in the atmosphere, statistical treatments of fireball datasets, and the use of seismometers to detect and characterize bolide airbursts, a technique that extends monitoring to events too small or too remote for optical networks. Together these approaches constrain the flux of material reaching Earth and the physical structure of the parent bodies, connecting the meteorite record in laboratories to the asteroid populations observed telescopically.

Sample return missions have fundamentally changed the evidentiary basis of the field, and their results resonated through many sessions. Material returned from the carbonaceous asteroids Ryugu and Bennu has provided uncontaminated, space-weathered primitive material whose mineralogy, organic content and isotopic composition can be compared directly with meteorite classes. Work building on these samples, including studies of the volatile inventory and thermal history of primitive bodies, was among the research highlighted in the conference’s session literature. The comparison between returned samples and telescopic spectra of larger populations such as the D-type and P-type objects in the outer belt and Jupiter’s Trojan swarms remains a central challenge, and new infrared surveys of these populations are helping to close the gap between the few bodies visited by spacecraft and the hundreds of thousands catalogued from Earth.

The meeting also underscored the growing role of machine learning and large-scale computation in small body science. Automated classification of light curves, neural-network detection of moving objects in survey images, and large N-body simulations of asteroid family evolution are now standard tools, and several presentations examined how these methods perform on the data volumes expected from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Orbit determination for potentially hazardous objects, impact probability computation and the propagation of uncertainties over decadal timescales all benefit from these advances, as do efforts to link meteorite falls to asteroid families through dynamical modeling. The methodological convergence across subfields, from comet photometry to meteoroid stream modeling, was one of the practical takeaways emphasized by attendees.

Beyond the science, the Poznań meeting made a deliberate effort to broaden participation. Support from the ESA Academy, the Europlanet Society, the NASA Planetary Data System Small Bodies Node, the UAE Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and industry partners enabled early-career researchers and scientists from underrepresented and underprivileged groups to attend, and the UAE Space Agency sponsored the conference’s Best Poster Award. Financial backing from Poland’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education through the Wektory Nauki programme, the Wielkopolska regional government and the Initiative of Excellence – Research University programme of Adam Mickiewicz University underwrote the meeting itself. Organizers noted that the resulting exchange helped foster new collaborations across the global small body community, a stated aim of a series that has historically rotated among host countries to keep the field international.

As the 15th edition closed, the field it surveyed looked markedly different from the one that gathered three years earlier. Spacecraft are en route to metallic and primitive asteroids, survey telescopes are cataloguing small bodies at rates that outpace manual analysis, and laboratory measurements of returned samples are rewriting textbooks on Solar System formation. The questions that will define the next ACM conference, expected in 2029, are already taking shape: how efficiently kinetic impactors transfer momentum to real rubble piles, how the isotopic diversity of meteorites maps onto asteroid spectral classes, and how the smallest members of the Solar System’s debris population record the giant planets’ early history. For the community that met in Poznań, the small bodies of the Solar System have never been a bigger subject.

Subject of Research: Asteroids, comets and meteors in the Solar System

Article Title: The 15th Asteroids Comets Meteors Conference

Article References: The 15th Asteroids Comets Meteors Conference. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02995-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02995-3

Keywords: asteroids, comets, meteors, planetary defence, DART, Hera, sample return, meteorites, Kuiper belt, near-Earth asteroids, space surveys, ACM 2026