The 44th Scientific Assembly of Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) took place in Athens, Greece, on July 16-24, 2022. The aims of COSPAR include promoting research by providing platforms for free exchange of scientific thought. The Assembly is a large annual conference that combined 151 sections within 10 scientific commissions in 2022. Thematically, COSPAR encompasses various aspects of astronomical research – from materials in space to astrobiology, supermassive black holes and elementary particles. COSPAR 2022 combined in-person and remote participation.

VUAS ERI VIRAC leading researcher Juris Kalvāns participated in COSPAR 2022 Commission F “Life Sciences as Related to Space” Section F3.5 “Simple and Complex Molecules in Star-forming Regions” with a solicited talk “Collisional desorption of ices in interstellar clouds”. J. Kalvāns is also the head of VIRAC Astronomy and astrophysics department. The talk was done remotely by sending a previously prepared presentation in video format. In the talk, his recent theoretical computer modelling research on the collisions between icy interstellar dust grains in dense clouds, which are also the birth sites of stars. As a result of such collisions, molecules that can be synthesized only on the surface of the grains can appear in the gas phase of the cloud. Thus, grain collisions may help explaining the observations of such molecules in the gas. Such phenomena are especially relevant for organic molecules, similar to those Earth inherited from interstellar dust during the formation of the Solar system.

The participation in COSPAR 2022 was made possible thanks to the Latvian Council of Sciences project “Desorption of icy molecules in the interstellar medium (DIMD)”, No. lzp-2021/1-0076 under the programme of Fundamental and Applied Research Projects.