The World Expo 2025 took place in Osaka, Japan from April 13 to June 10. The University of Bern and the Center for Space and Habitability were part of the Swiss Pavilion with instruments built for the ESA/JAXA space missions Juice and Comet Interceptor!
The showcase “The Scent of Space” featured models of Bernese mass spectrometers for two ESA missions with contributions from JAXA: Juice, en route to Jupiter’s icy moons, and Comet Intercept, soon visiting a pristine comet. Visitors to the Swiss Pavilion experienced the ‘scent’ of a comet, recreated from measurements taken by the Bernese mass spectrometer ROSINA on board the ESA Rosetta mission, which flew to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Bern has hosted three events at the Swiss Pavilion. The first one on 15 April 2025 was a public talk and comet-building workshop on Comet Interceptor with Michael Küppers, Planetary Scientist at ESA. The second one was for invited guests from academia on 25 April 2025 and featured keynote speakers Dr. Masaki Fujimoto (Director General, ISAS of JAXA), Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter (Rector of the University of Bern), Dr. Marco Sieber (Swiss Astronaut, ESA) and Prof. Dr. Audrey Vorburger (Assistant Professor of Space Research and Planetary Sciences, University of Bern). The third event, “from the moon to comets: take a walk” was a public event organised with researchers from the University of Bern, ISAS/JAXA, the University of Tokyo and the Kyoto Sangyo University and took place on 6 June 2025.
With an attendance of over 300’000 from April to June 2025, it was the largest international science diplomacy event that the University had participated in. The main goal of the University’s participation was to raise awareness among the general public, as well as Swiss and Japanese stakeholders, of important ESA and JAXA space missions involving Bern.
