For the last few days I have been hanging out at the British Planetary Science Conference (BPSC) being held in Oxford. BPSC takes place every two years and in fact this is just its second outing, the inaugural meeting was in Glasgow in December 2017. Sharing your work with colleagues and catching up with all the other fantastic planetary research going on in the UK is obviously very important. And there really is a lot of activity in areas including new space missions, ongoing missions, sample analysis and theoretical studies. My two favourite items were the updates on the ExoMars 2020 rover, now known as the Rosalind Franklin rover, due for launch this summer and EnVision a proposed Venus orbiter mission which is in the final stages of the selection process. My contribution to the meeting was a talk highlighting how our understanding of early Solar System processes would be transformed by the return of material from the surface of Venus.

Image above: ExoMars 2020 Rover – Rosalind Franklin (Credit: ESA)