Colder than your ex's heart: ice and rocks in the solar system

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 25th February 2021 (19:45 - 21:00)

Venue: Virtual Meeting

Over the past few years, our understanding of the leftovers of the solar system has changed considerably: Two of the space missions that played a role in that are the European Rosetta mission and the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission. Rosetta landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a bizarrely-shaped object a lot less rich in ice than expected. Hayabusa2, on the other hand, delivered some landers to asteroid Ryugu, the darkest known object in the solar system, and is on its way to its next target after delivering two samples of asteroid material to Earth. Axel is a Co-investigator on both of these missions and will put their observations into the context of the research going on in the Swedish Planetary Ices Laboratory, a facility that specialises in simulating the behaviour and interactions of rocks and ice in space conditions.

Speaker: Prof. Axel Hagermann

Axel studied geophysics and planetary physics in Karlsruhe and Münster, Germany. After a JSPS postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he had a brief stint as an instrument manager on ESA's Rosetta space mission, based at the University of Cologne. In 2004, he moved to the Open University as part of the Cassini-Huygens team, investigating Saturn's moon Titan. Axel has since been working on the analysis of space mission data and supporting science. In 2018, he joined the University of Stirling, from where he moved on to Luleå University’s space campus in Kiruna, Sweden - a suitable geographical location for his main research interest: ices. Axel is particularly interested in the thermophysics of ices and regolith - preferably a mixture of both: icy regolith. He also likes ice cream.