The Europlanet RI TransNational Access Planetary Analogue Terrain Laboratory (PATLab)

A proposal entitled Europlanet Research Infrastructure (RI) has been submitted to the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). This aims to “consolidate the integration of the planetary science community (which started with Europlanet’s FP6 Coordination Action), and to integrate a major distributed European infrastructure to be shared, fed and expanded by all planetary scientists”. “The research infrastructure needed to address the major planetary science questions extends beyond the space missions per se. It requires a diversity of tools that need to be used with maximum synergy, with numerical modelling and results from laboratory activities being essential to properly interpret observations and propose new theoretical models”1. To address this need, TransNational Access activities have been proposed that will for the first time open to a broad community of users a unique and comprehensive set of laboratory facilities and field sites tailored to the needs of planetary research. One such TransNational Access (TNA) facility is the Aberystwyth University Planetary Analogue Terrain Laboratory (PATLab). This paper presents an overview of the PATLab, and describes the analogue terrain, available robotic, instrumentation, and performance evaluation measurement apparatus, software-based simulation facilities, and PATLab access by the planetary research community