Monday 11^th December to Wednesday 13^th December, 2023

Geological Society, Burlington House, London

The GRSG Committee would like to say thank you to all those speakers, sponsors and delegates for attending and making another successful AGM, without you this would not happen; we had 11 sponsors and around 90 delegates this year.

Many attended from the UK and Europe but we also had visitors from Kazakhstan, the US and South Africa; a special thank you to the large number of those who have come further than Guildford to speak.

The opening morning commenced with a keynote from Dr Philippa Mason from Imperial College on Planetary Remote Sensing, presenting on EnVision, a future Venus orbiter, and specifically on its goals, sensor capabilities and imaging strategy hopefully going to provide more insight on the questions about the second planet from the Sun – exciting things to come from 2030.

The same morning we had further insights to sensing of Venus and Mars.  The rest of the day included a session on monitoring mine waste and the detection and characterisation of oil spills and seeps on the seas surface.  Additionally, Chevron and BP updated us on what their main EO tasks have been recently.  The evening’s fine wine reception in the Library at the Geolsoc was preceded by the AGM, fantastically hosted by our Chairwoman.

During the meeting, everyone was asked to contribute to a survey that will help with future planning. The results are below:

For those who have been wondering where Dr George LeBlanc (National Research Council of Canada) has been for the last few AGMs he was working on his keynote that he ably presented on the morning of Day 2.  He brought to our attention while USGS’s Landsat cal/val is the gold standard in the industry other operators may only provide calibration information on their sensors pre-launch so its useful for us as the user to be mindful that it is documented on simulated data.

Almost like it was planned, Todd Hoefen from the USGS was one of the presenters in the following Mineral Exploration session.  To finish the afternoon, we had an energetic early careers session with Livi Rhind, (CGG Satellite Mapping), Lori Wickert (Descartes Labs) and Xu Teo (SatVu) speaking about their career journey and then questions were opened up to the room for the audience participation.

The Conference Dinner was a floating one, aboard the Tattershall Castle, with some picturesque views of the Thames – anyone not feeling 100% the following morning can at least put it down to sea sickness, maybe…

The final day was the second MinEx session using space and airborne based superspectral and hyperspectral imagery for classification for mineralogy and gasses.  People leaving early on Day 3 missed a good final session on InSAR for CCUS, several new sensors before Planet’s very enthusiastic final talk on planetary variables.

As of recent times the Afterglow was in a very busy Glassblower – for those esteemed delegates celebrating their birthday that day, we hope you had a good one.

The European Space Agency has been chosen for next year, at which we hope to see as many as you as possible.  Thank you from the Committee and we look forward to Frascati 2024, more info will follow when we know.