Ariel: Science, Mission & Community 2026
The Ariel Mission Consortium and ESA Ariel Science Team are delighted to invite the international scientific community to attend the Ariel Open Conference 2026, hosted at the ESA Magali Vaissiere Conference Centre, in the Harwell Campus in the UK.
The conference “Ariel: Science, Mission & Community 2026” will provide an overall summary of the Ariel’s science, instrument and operations and present the many activities that the Ariel team have planned to engage the science community at large and the public. These include educational and citizen-science programs such as ExoClock and the Ariel Data Challenges. Contributions and feedback from the attendees are welcomed through oral and poster presentations (submit your abstract here), and focused panel discussions.
About Ariel – The Ariel space telescope, to be launched at the end of this decade as part of the ESA Science Programme, is the first mission dedicated to the determination of the chemical composition and thermal structure of hundreds of exoplanets, enabling planetary science far beyond the boundaries of the Solar System. Ariel has been conceived to deliver a spectroscopic survey of ~ 1000 transiting exoplanets, covering simultaneously the range 0.5-7.8 micron, and probing uniformly the gamut of planetary and stellar parameters.
The Ariel payload is developed by a consortium of more than 50+ institutes from 16 ESA countries, which include the UK, France, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, with important contributions from NASA, JAXA and CSA.
More information about Ariel can be found here
Venue & Dates
The event will be held between 17 to 19 March 2026 in the ESA’s Magali Vaissiere Conference Centre, located beside ESA ECSAT, Harwell Campus.
Venue: ESA Magali Vaissiere Conference Centre
Fermi Avenue
Harwell Campus
Didcot, Oxfordshire, OX11 0FD
United Kingdom
How to get there
Registration fees include coffee breaks and lunches. Early registration fee (until November 10th) is €275. Late registration fee (10 November – 15 February) is €350. A limited number of discounted fees/fee waivers is available for students and early career scientists. Applications are accepted until November 10th using the abstract submission page.
Looking forward to seeing you at the conference in March 2026!
Questions? You can contact us at openconference2026 at arielmission.space
Agenda
Abstract submission is now only open for poster contributions
Preliminary program
Tuesday, 17th March
- The ESA Ariel Mission, Science, Targets and Mission properties (9:00 – 12:30)
Theresa Lueftinger – ESA Exoplanet Missions & Ariel in context, AST, ESA Open Calls
Giovanna Tinetti – Ariel Overview
Jean-Christophe Salvignol – ESA Ariel Programme
Paul Eccleston – Ariel payload
Anja Hofmann, Chris Pearson – Ariel Ground Segment
Billy Edwards – How does Ariel Target Candidate Selection work?
Nic Cowan – Optimising Ariel observational strategy (Tiers, Phase-curves)
Anastasia Kokori – ExoClock
Lorenzo Mugnai – The Ariel Simulation Framework, from radiometric budgets to end-to-end performance assessment
Ahmed Al-Refaie, Arun Nambiyath Govindan – ExoDB - Keynote talk: Doug Lin (UC Santa Cruz) (13:15 – 13:45)
- Discs & Planet Formation (13:45 – 15:05)
Melissa Mc Clure (University of Leiden) – Invited: JWST reveals the impact of protoplanetary disk ice chemistry on exoplanet compositions
Elenia Pacetti – From Discs to Planets: How Planet Formation Shapes Planetary Compositions
Shivam Joshi – Rethinking Debris Discs: How Gas Reshapes the Architecture of HD 131488
Lina D’Aoust – Testing the Origin of Hot Jupiters with Ariel
Norio Narita – Toward Characterization of Young Transiting Planets with Ariel - Properties of host stars & star-planet interactions (15:35 – 17:15)
Dolev Bashi (Cambridge University) – Invited: How does the Galactic Environment Shape Planet Populations? Implications for Ariel and atmospheric demographics.
Alix Violet Freckelton – The Gr8stars catalogue of homogeneously derived parameters for bright FGKM dwarfs and its impact in investigating spectroscopic method systematics.
Maria Tsantaki – Characterising the host stars that will shape Ariel’s exoplanet science
Katia Poppenhaeger (Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam) – Invited: Star-Planet Interactions: why our favourite exoplanets have extra interesting physics going on
Nina-Elisabeth Nemec – Measuring the scales of convection using planetary transits
Alex Thompson – Assessing the Sensitivity of the Ariel Tier Strategy to Stellar Variability
Antonio GARCIA MUNOZ – Upper atmospheres and star-planet interactions in the Ariel context - Poster session I
Wednesday, 18th March
- Exoplanet Demographics – Exoplanet Detection and Characterisation (9:30 – 11:30)
Anne Marie Lagrange (Observatoire de Paris, CNRS) – Invited: – Exoplanets detected and characterised by direct imaging
Alessandro Sozzetti (INAF, Osservatorio di Torino) – Invited: Exoplanets detected by astrometry – Gaia
Gaia Lacedelli – Investigating planetary populations among sub-Neptunes with Ariel
Peter Wheatley – Atmospheric characterisation of new temperate Jupiters around bright stars from TESS+NGTS
Sharon Xuesong Wang (Tsinghua University) – Invited: Exoplanets detected and characterised by radial velocity
Serena Benatti – The Ariel Masses Survey at TNG: delivering robust mass measurements for planets in the Radius Valley - Atmospheric models & observations (11:30 – 16:20)
Nestor Espinoza (Space Telescope Science Institute) – Invited: Exoplanetary atmospheres with JWST
Emma Esparza Borges – JWST and cross-correlation techniques: An isotopologue-sensitive technique for exoplanet atmospheric studies
Martin Binet – A systematic analysis of exoplanet transmission spectra with JWST-MIRI
Daniel Valentine – Eclipse Mapping with Ariel: Future Prospects for a Population-Level Mapping Survey
Achrene Dyrek – Assessing Ariel’s Potential for Low-Density Exoplanet Characterization
Vanesa Ramirez – Probing Exoplanetary Deformation with Ariel
Sushuang Ma – Large-Scale Population Study of Exoplanetary Atmospheres Across Known Types to Prepare the Ariel Mission Observation Tier Strategy
Syed Wasi Mohsin Naqvi – HERMES: HiERarchical Modelling for Exoplanet Science
Robin Baeyens (University of Amsterdam) – Invited: – Challenges for Atmospheric Modelling: Climates, Clouds, and Chemistry
Mei Ting Mak – Impact of Photochemical Haze on Chemistry in Hot-Jupiters: Key Implications for Ariel Interpretations
Eric HEBRARD – 3D Chemistry of Dynamic Hot/Warm Gas Giants
Jack Skinner – Modons, Storms, and Atmospheric Variability on Hot Exoplanets
Jonathan Tennyson – ExoMol - From the solar system to exoplanets (16:20 – 17:00)
Paul Hartogh (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research) – Invited: The Submillimetre Wave Instrument on JUICE
Dmitrij Titov – Venus – an “exoplanet” next door - Poster session II
- Conference dinner in Oxford
Thursday, 19th March
- Interiors & connection to atmospheres (9:30 – 11:35)
Lena Noack (Freie Universität Berlin) – Invited: Exoplanetary interior
Henrik Knierim – Unraveling the origin of giant exoplanets: Observational implications of convective mixing
Kevin Heng – The Geoastronomy of Sub-Neptunes
Marie-Luise Steinmeyer – Blurring the line: Evolution of sub-Neptunes using coupled interior-atmosphere models
Yuichi Ito – Retrieval Framework for Magma-Ocean Characterization on Sub-Neptunes
Darius Modirrousta-Galian – On the connection between observed atmospheric abundances and planetary interiors and evolutions - Synergies with other missions and observatories (11:30 – 14:45)
Juan Cabrera (DLR, Berlin) – Invited: ESA Plato
George Ricker ((Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – Invited: NASA TESS
Scott Gaudi (Ohio State University) – Invited: NASA Nancy Roman
Monika Lendl (Université de Genève) – Invited: Characterising Exoplanets Together: Synergies between CHEOPS and Ariel
Jian Ge (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory) – Invited: CAS Earth 2.0
Quentin Changeat – Synergy JWST – Ariel
Arianna Saba – BSSL Mauve - Complementary Science and Community Engagement (14:45 – 15:30)
Matt Griffin – The Ariel Complementary Science Programme
Csaba Kiss – Potential of complementary science observations of young stellar objects and circumstellar disk transient phenomena with Ariel
Roman Akhmetshyn – Ariel – the weather satellite for free-floating planets - AI and Data science & panel discussion (16:00 – 17:00)
Kai Hou Yip – Ariel Data Challenges – a review
Massimiliano Giordano Orsini – Flow Matching Posterior Estimation for Exoplanetary Atmospheric Retrieval
Antonia Vojtekova – Exploring the Black Box: What Neural Networks Really Learn About Exoplanet Atmospheres
Sara Marques – A conditional transformer based generative model for planetary systems
Jo Ann Egger – Using neural networks to infer the interiors of observed super-Earths and sub-Neptunes
Luís F. Simões – Is machine learning applicable there? Safety cages for operational range bounding of spectroscopy models - Feedback about Ariel from participants (17:00 – 18:00)
SOC:
- Sudeshna Boro Saikia (University of Vienna, AT),
- Sarah Casewell (University of Leicester, UK)
- Quentin Changeat (University of Groningen, NL)
- Nicolas Cowan (McGill University, CA),
- Camilla Danielski (University of Valencia, ES),
- Paul Eccleston (RAL Space, UK),
- Billy Edwards (SRON, NL),
- Davide Gandolfi (Turin University, IT),
- Masahiro Ikoma, (The University of Tokyo, JP),
- Pierre-Olivier Lagage (CEA, FR),
- Jeremy Leconte (CNRS, FR),
- Theresa Lueftinger (Co-Chair, ESA/ESTEC, NL),
- Zita Martins, (Universidade de Lisboa, PT),
- Giusi Micela (INAF, IT),
- Enzo Pascale (La Sapienza U. of Rome, IT),
- Miriam Rengel (MPS Göttingen, DE)
- Mark Swain (NASA/JPL, US),
- Giovanna Tinetti (Co-Chair, King’s College London, UK),
- Bart Vandenbussche (KU Leuven, BE),
LOC:
- Rachel Drummond (RAL Space, UK),
- Ezgi Guler (ESA/ECSAT, UK),
- Wendy Elderfield (ESA/ECSAT, UK),
- Costanza Azzini (KCL, UK),
- Arun Nambiyath Govindan (UCL, UK),
- Heleri Ramler (U. of Tartu, EE)
- Paul Eccleston (RAL Space, UK),
- Giovanna Tinetti (KCL, UK)
Accommodations
A list of accommodations close to the conference centre is available here.