Dominique Bockelée-Morvan (born 1957) is a French astrophysicist and planetary scientist specializing in the molecular composition of comets.[1] She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the Paris Observatory,[2] and a former president of Commission 15 on the Physical Study of Comets & Minor Planets of the International Astronomical Union.[3]
Bockelée-Morvan earned a doctorate in 1987 through Paris Diderot University, with the dissertation Les conditions d'excitation des molecules meres dans les atmospheres cometaires : applications a l'eau et a l'acide cyanhydrique, supervised by Jacques Crovisier.[4]
She was president of Commission 15 on the Physical Study of Comets & Minor Planets of the International Astronomical Union, from 2012 to 2015.[3]
Bockelée-Morvan brought the study of comets from a (literally) dusty backwater of planetary science into the mainstream.[2][5] Through infrared and radio observations of comets,[2] and the development of excitation models for cometary chemicals,[1] she has found over 20 different molecular impurities in their ice.[2] Her work found connections between the makeup of comets and of the interstellar medium, and with prebiotic chemistry.[5] She has also helped explain the 3.4 μm-wavelength emissions of comets.[1]
She has been a collaborator on the MIRO and VIRTIS experiments on the Rosetta space probe and its 2014 flyby study of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.[2][5] Beyond comets, she has also contributed to the first discovery of water vapor on the asteroid Ceres.[5]
Bockelée-Morvan was the 1991 winner of the Thorlet Prize [fr] of the French Academy of Sciences, for her studies of Halley's Comet. She won the young researcher prize of the Société Française d'Astronomie et d'Astrophysique (SF2A) in 1992.[6]
She received the David Bates Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2002, "for her exceptional observations and interpretations of the composition of comets".[7] She received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2014.[2][5]
Asteroid 4020 Dominique, discovered in 1981, was named after Bockelée-Morvan.[1]
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