Eberhard Grün

Eberhard Grün (born March 30, 1942 ) is a German astrophysicist and planetologist , known for research on interstellar and interplanetary dust .

Grün studied physics at Heidelberg University with a diploma in 1968 and received his doctorate there in 1970, doing his dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg (Mass Spectroscopy of Impact Induced Ions). He then developed detectors for cosmic dust for use in space probes at the MPI for Nuclear Physics and was also present at the Goddard Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center of NASA . In 1974 he was employed at the MPI for Nuclear Physics. In 1981 he completed his habilitation in Heidelberg and in the same year went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for six months (including analysis of Voyager 2 data) and then to the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute in Houston . In addition to his research work at the MPI (head of the Staub group), he became a professor at Heidelberg University in 1989. In 2007 he retired from the MPI, but remained scientifically active, including at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder .

From 2000 to 2007 he also conducted research at the Hawaii institute of Geophysics and Planetology. In 2004 he was visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Green has been a driving force in the development of dust detectors in space probes since the 1970s, which made it possible to analyze dust by mass, speed and direction. He was able to identify dust flows from volcanoes of Io , which were accelerated by the magnetic field of Jupiter, the flow of interstellar dust through the solar system and ice flows from cryovolcanoes on Enceladus , which feed the E-ring of Saturn.

He also studied impact events and meteorites and comets.

He was Principal Investigator for measurements of interstellar and interplanetary dust on various space probe missions such as Helios 1 (1974), Helios 2 (1976), Galileo (1989), Ulysses (1990) and Cassini-Huygens (1997) and he was also on Giotto (1985 ), Vega , the Japanese Mars probe Nozomi (1998), Stardust and Rosetta .

In 2011 he received the gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society . On July 1, 1996, an asteroid was named after him: (4240) Green .

Web links

• Receipt of the gold medal of the RAS, MPI Heidelberg