Workshop Participants (picture taken by S. Saliba)

The presence of water at the surface of a planetary body is well known to be one of the key conditions for its habitability. But how does that condition come to be fulfilled as a result of the formation and evolution of protoplanets, planets and satellites? How frequent is the presence of water on these bodies, since it happened on Earth and, for instance, for Jupiter’s satellite Europa in our solar system? The workshop will attempt to clarify the processes by which water was delivered to planetary bodies in solar and exoplanetary systems, during their formation and evolution.

The respective roles of the initial condensation of water in regions of the protoplanetary nebula, of the planetesimal accretion processes and of the collisions of asteroids and comets with the forming planets, will be discussed. The workshop will consider in detail the implications of the proposed formation scenarios of giant planets and their satellites, and of those of terrestrial planets, on the delivery of water to those bodies.

A special emphasis will also be placed on the remarkable diversity of processes affecting the water budget during the evolution of a planetary body, through a detailed review of these processes.

Finally, the workshop will review what we expect to learn from future space and ground-based observations of water in the solar system and far beyond.

One of the important outcomes of the meeting should be to assess the confidence with which  we can evaluate the probability of presence of water on planets and satellites in
the Universe, and from where that water originates. It should also provide us with indications on the most important directions for future works, and on the contributions we can expect from future space and ground-based observing facilities.