A&G Highlights Meeting Programme
December 12th 2025
16:00 Prof Mike Lockwood (President)
Welcome and Announcements
16:05 RAS Diary Talk 2025
Dr Louise Devoy (Senior Curator, Royal Greenwich Observatory)
“350 years of astronomy, navigation and timekeeping at Greenwich”
At the heart of international timekeeping and navigation stands the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, a place where science and innovation intersected to shape the modern world. Today, as the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the historic prime meridian, 0° longitude, it is an institution of international renown.
In this presentation, curator and author Louise Devoy will explore the rich legacy of this famous site through a selection of fascinating objects, themes and personal stories. From the intricacy of John Harrison’s revolutionary timekeepers to the impressive scale of the Great Equatorial Telescope, each item demonstrates the Observatory’s achievements in pioneering astronomy, innovative engineering, accurate time distribution and collaborative scientific projects. Together they chart the development of the Observatory from its founding in 1675 to its growing influence on travel, trade and communication that continues to underpin our lives today.
Dr Louise Devoy (Senior Curator, Royal Greenwich Observatory)
Louise has a background in astrophysics and the history of science and has worked at various museums in the UK and abroad. Her research interests encompass astronomical instruments, women in astronomy and networks of knowledge exchange between historic observatories.
Over the past five years Louise has delved into the archives and museum stores to choose 100 objects and their stories for her book Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects, published to celebrate the Observatory’s 350th anniversary in 2025.
16:35 Dr Go Murakami (ISAS/JAXA)
" BepiColombo -the ESA-JAXA joint mission to Mercury"
BepiColombo is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), to will carry out a comprehensive exploration of planet Mercury. The mission was launched on 20 October 2018 from the European spaceport Kourou in French Guiana, and is currently on a eight-year-long cruise to Mercury. BepiColombo consists of two orbiters: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio). Following their release from the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) in September 2026, these orbiters will be put in orbit around the innermost planet of our Solar System in November 2026. Once in orbit, BepiColombo with its very comprehensive, interdisciplinary payload will perform measurements to increase our knowledge on the fundamental questions about Mercury’s evolution, composition, interior, magnetosphere, and exosphere. BepiColombo successfully completed all the flybys in January 2025 and will continue its cruise during the remainder of 2025 and much of 2026. In April 2027 they will start their nominal science observations around Mercury. In this talk, I will provide a summary of the mission and a broad overview of scientific goals and observations planned after the Mercury orbit insertion.
Dr Go Murakami (ISAS/JAXA)
Go Murakami is an Assistant Professor working at Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He is the Project Scientist of the ESA-JAXA joint mission BepiColombo for Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter: Mio. His science expertise is solar terrestrial plasma physics and planetary atmospheric science. He got his Ph.D by The University of Tokyo in 2011. Then he worked at JAXA/ISAS as a research fellow between 2011-2017 for developments and observations of Japanese ultraviolet space telescope Hisaki and the BepiColombo mission. In 2017 he got the current position at JAXA/ISAS.
17:00 Dr Lina Hadid (LPP - CNRS, Observatoire de Paris)
“The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on its way to Mercury: initial observations during cruise”
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission is now nearing the end of its cruise phase and approaching Mercury, with orbital insertion planned for November 2026. During this 7 years of cruise, the spacecraft has performed a series of planetary gravity-assist maneuvers while operating in a stacked configuration. Although most instruments cannot yet be fully operational or deployed, several have nonetheless acquired scientifically valuable plasma observations, both during the six Mercury swing-bys (MSB1-MSB6) and in the solar wind at the inner heliosphere. These measurements have captured key features of Mercury’s plasma environment as well as a variety of heliospheric transients, including coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar energetic particle (SEP) events.
This talk will focus on ion observations from the Mass Spectrum Analyzer (MSA) and the Mercury Ion Analyzer (MIA), both part of the Mercury Plasma Particle Experiment (MPPE). We will highlight results from the third, fourth, and sixth Mercury swing-bys, together with an overview of transient solar-wind events detected by BepiColombo during the cruise phase.
These early results reveal strong variability in Mercury’s magnetosphere across different flyby geometries and solar-wind conditions, offering a tantalizing preview of the rich scientific return expected during the nominal mission after orbital insertion.
Dr Lina Hadid (LPP - CNRS, Observatoire de Paris)
Lina Hadid is an astrophysicist and research scientist at the Laboratory of Plasma Physics (LPP), École Polytechnique / CNRS, in France since 2020. Her research focuses on studying the microphysical and macrophysical plasma processes in the solar wind and planetary magnetospheres. She analyzes wave and particle measurements in a variety of planetary environments, including Mercury, Earth, Venus, and Saturn, as well as in the solar wind, adopting a comparative planetology approach.
She is the lead of the Mass Spectrum Analyzer (MSA) onboard the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury. She is also the PI of the Mars - Mass Spectrum Analyzer for ESA’s M7 mission M-MATISSE, a multi-point mission to Mars currently in Phase A (2023–2026). In addition to her role in BepiColombo and M-MATISSE, she has contributed to several international space missions, including NASA’s Cassini mission and ESA’s JUICE and Solar Orbiter missions.
Lina Hadid earned her MSc from Paris-Saclay University in 2013 and her PhD in Astrophysics from the Laboratory of Plasma Physics at École Polytechnique in 2016. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala (2017–2019) and later at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands in 2019, before joining CNRS as a permanent research scientist at LPP in 2020.
17:25 Dr Paola Pinilla (MSSL/UCL)
“How planets are made of star stuff”
In this new era of powerful telescopes such as ALMA and JWST, we are now able to study the birth of planets in disks around young stars, in more detail than ever before. New observations are revealing fascinating structures in protoplanetary disks that are transforming our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems. In this talk, I will explain theoretical models of dust evolution in protoplanetary disks and I will compare these theoretical predictions with current multi-wavelength disk observations. This link is providing significant insights about how different physical conditions play a crucial role in the formation of the first planetesimals, and is extending our understanding of how initial conditions and evolutionary processes of protoplanetary disks are shaping the diversity of extrasolar systems observed up today.
Dr Paola Pinilla (MSSL/UCL)
Dr. Paola Pinilla is an associate professor at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of UCL. She studied her BSc and MSc in her country of origin, Colombia. She did a PhD at Heidelberg University in Germany and hold several positions before joining UCL, including: a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden Observatory, a NASA Hubble Fellowship at University of Arizona, and an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Her research interests focus on understanding the first steps of planet formation using theoretical models and observations of young stars. Paola also enjoys working on topics related to equity, diversity, and inclusion. She was recently awarded an ERC starting grant, the 2024 New Horizons in Physics Prize, and the 2025 Royal Astronomical Society Price Medal.
17:55 Prof Mike Lockwood (President)
Closing Remarks
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