Hervé Cottin

Biography

Hervé Cottin is a professor at Paris-Est-Créteil University (UPEC), where he teaches chemistry and astronomy. He conducts research at the Interuniversity Laboratory of Atmospheric Systems (LISA). He is President of the French Exobiology Society, a member of the CNES Solar System working group and head of the UPEC Space Campus. His research focuses on the origin and evolution of cometary organic matter. He is seeking to understand the extent to which comets may have contributed to the appearance of life on Earth, and how their composition may provide information about the birth of the solar system. His work is based on laboratory experiments and in situ measurements with the Rosetta space mission. It is complemented by studies in Earth orbit outside the International Space Station. Recently, Hervé Cottin contributed to the detection of glycine (the simplest amino acid) and organic macromolecules in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. He is also a member of the scientific team behind the MOMA (Mars Organic Molecule Analyser) instrument, which will search for organic matter on the surface of Mars using the Rosalind Franklin rover on the European ExoMars mission.

Conference: Has the time of comets arrived?

Primitive matter in a freezer where time has stood still: that’s how we might view comets, one of the most mysterious objects in the solar system. Because of their small size, comets have probably not been transformed by their own gravity. Kept at the very edges of the solar system, in the coldest and most remote regions, they have been preserved from solar radiation. Comets may contain matter that has not evolved since their formation, reflecting the conditions that prevailed at the time of our system’s formation. Comets are often referred to as “the archives of the sky”. What can we learn from them?