The first edition of the day of the Research Institutes of the UB was held last Tuesday, June 22. This year's edition was primarily focused on the exploration (and exploitation) of space with the goal of discussing space from a plural and cross-disciplinary perspective so as to obtain a more accurate and realistic image of the situation of space exploration.
The act was presented by professor Albert Díaz (coordinator of the research Institutes of the UB), professor Jordi Garcia (Research Vicerector of the UB) and professor Joan Guàrdia (Rector of the UB) and it counted with the participation of nine out of the eighteen UB's research Institutes, being among those the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) which was awarded the Maria de Maeztu excellence distinction by the previous Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
The day commenced with a round table about a very local space project: Catalonia's NewSpace strategy, as an example of how space is a part of our day-to-day lives. The table was composed by Daniel Marco (general director of Innovation and Economy of the Catalan government (Generalitat de Catalunya)), Ignasi Ribas (director of the Institute of Space Sciences of Catalonia (IEEC)), Jordi Corbera (manager of the program PCOT of the Institute of Cartography and Geology of Catalonia) and Mònica Roca (president of the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona) with Xavier Luri (director of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB)) as a moderator.
In the second half of the event, we enjoyed a series of conferences given by researchers from different research Institutes of the UB that provided singular points of views of space exploration from their fields of expertise. Among them we want to highlight the talk about space weather given by the researcher of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the UB Àngels Aran, which was named «The exploration of the inner heliosphere: the key the understanding space weather» and in which she spoke about the physical processes involved in solar flares and also about the missions launched to study the activity of the inner heliosphere.
The event was followed by almost 50 people via UBTv or via the University of Barcelona's YouTube Channel, from which the audience was able to ask questions and interact with the programmed activities throughout the day.
You can watch the whole event on the ICCUB's YouTube channel here.