About
Athena Coustenis
Director of Research Exceptional Class CNRS
LESIA,
Paris-Meudon Observatory, France
Athena Coustenis is an Astrophysicist, Director of Research Exceptional Class with the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France, working at Paris Observatory in Meudon. Her specialty is Planetology (exploration and study of the Solar System from ground-based and space observations). Her research is devoted to the investigation of planetary atmospheres and surfaces, with emphasis on the outer solar system bodies, in particular icy moons like Titan and Enceladus, Saturn’s satellites, and Jupiter’s Ganymede and Europa, objects with high astrobiological potential. She also works on the characterisation of exoplanetary atmospheres. She has led many observational campaigns from the ground using large telescopes (CFHT, UKIRT, VLT, etc) and has used the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) to conduct planetary investigations.
A. Coustenis contributes to the definition and development of space missions and to the exploitation of the acquired data. She is Co-Investigator of three of the instruments (CIRS, HASI, DISR) aboard the recently completed Cassini-Huygens space mission to Saturn and Titan, in which she was involved from the beginning of the definition phase. She analyses and interprets the spectro-imaging data recovered since 2004 using her own radiative transfer codes and other analysis tools.
She has contributed in or led several other proposals, studies and development phases for space missions to the outer solar system and the exoplanets. Her expertise in space missions has allowed her to Chair or to participate in several advisory groups within ESA and NASA and other European Institutions, which, among others, currently include: Chair of the European Science Foundation Space Science Committee (ESF-ESSC); Chair of the COSPAR Panel on Planetary Protection; Chair of the ESA Human Spaceflight and Exploration Science Advisory Committee (HESAC); and, Chair of the Comité d'Evaluation sur la Recherche et l'Exploration Spatiales (CERES) of the French Centre National des Etudes Spatiales (CNES).
I come from a country where people look up at the sky quite often, especially at nighttime. And from ages lost in time, they usually try to make sense of what they see. How Aristarchus invented the heliocentric solar system, how Eratosthenes proved the Earth was round and discovered the distance to the moon and how Anaximander had the Universe all structured out were my bedtime stories. And of course, I was very close to the sky myself. Not only because my name gave me rights to an Olympian abode, but also because in my family, except for my mother, we were all a little nuts about the sky: my father and brother are both in the Greek Air Force.
I did my PhD at Paris Observatory in Meudon, getting my first ‘taste’ of Titan from Voyager 1 infrared data working with colleagues who since then have become good friends. Once I got a glimpse of Titan, I was hooked, bewitched, inspired and haven’t left the Outer Solar System since then… Right after my Ph.D. defense in 1989, I was engaged in three instrument proposals, all of which managed to get aboard Cassini-Huygens: CIRS on the orbiter (I knew quite a lot by then about infrared Titan spectra analysis of Titan) and HASI and DISR on the probe. I was the luckiest girl in world! The teams were fantastic, we threw ourselves into the definition of the instruments, we made observing plans and created models to be tested against the ground truth one day.
What is it like in every day life once you’ve finished your studies and managed to get a job as a researcher in this field?
I recently contributed to a short movie by O. Borderie, @tmosphere en images Production.
I came to Astrobiology quite early in my research. How could I miss the implications ‘Titan: the frozen Earth’, ‘organic chemistry closest to our planet’, the ‘methane cycle mimicking the water cycle on Earth’, etc. Of course, ancient Greek philosophers (them again !) had already thought of a universe consisting of “many worlds”. Thales, from Militos, and his students in the 7th century BCE argued for a Universe full of other planets, teaming with extraterrestrial life. They also proposed the idea with which we’re all familiar today (through Drake’s equation, among other and Carl Sagan’s musings, and the contributions of many other scientists’ arguments), i.e. that a Universe so full of stars must also have a large number of populated worlds. This proposal, was already defended by Epicurus and other Greek atomists who countered the geocentric models brought forward later on by Aristotle. The latter concept stuck, though, and hindered scientific progress in this domain for quite a long period of time. In 1862, the French scientist Camille Flammarion , published ‘La pluralité des mondes habités’ (‘on the plurality of inhabited worlds’), in which the conditions of habitability and the presence of life on such habitable planets of our Solar System is discussed. The public loved the book, but Urbain Le Verrier, then Director of the Paris Observatory , and many of his colleagues completely rejected Flammarion’s arguments, as did many of his colleagues. Flammarion was consequently fired from the Observatory… I have had better luck so far…
I’m allowed to be fascinated by the possibility that we could find information on how human beings arose and/or discover life forms elsewhere. Mars, Venus, Titan, Enceladus, Europa and other such places have been our favorite targets for exploring habitats in the Solar System and pushing current models of the origin and evolution of life to their limits, and beyond. Subsurface liquid water oceans, organic constituents swimming in exposed hydrocarbon lakes, water-laden geysers, the possibility of water hiding beneath the CO2 ice fields of Mars: All these new opportunities for exploration in the field of Astrobiology make my every day life and research work exciting and busy. Learning about and contributing to future missions to the Saturnian and Jovian systems are constant sources of joy and reward. understanding of the Universe.
Athena Coustenis was born in Athens, Greece and grew up in a garden suburb by the Saronic Bay before moving to France where she earned two Masters degrees and one PhD in Astronomy and Space Techniques (she started another PhD in English Literature and hopes to finish it one day…) thanks to a scholarship provided by the French University which furthermore allowed her to complete a Post-Doc at Paris Observatory and apply for a position with the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS).
I’m so very happy that my good friends of over two decades now, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, were presented with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019. I do not know of anybody who more deserves such an award and the recognition that goes along with it for the wonderful discoveries and the hard work they have done to give life to a whole new field in Astronomy: the study of exoplanets. I had the pleasure to meet Michel in 1996, just after he and Didier had announced the discovery of the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, in December 1995. We were at a meeting (the 5th International Conference on Bioastronomy, IAU Colloquium No. 161, which took place in Capri, Italy, on July 1-5 1996) and I had the immense pleasure of sitting next to Michel at dinner (see photo)… We got talking about exoplanets as at the time I was looking for signatures of the atmosphere around an exoplanet by observing 51 Peg and other exoplanets in high resolution spectroscopy using large ground-based telescopes (like the VLT). After that and for some time we worked together with Michel and Didier, along with several other colleagues, on characterising the exoplanets and thus going beyond detections, which is the purpose of the newly selected fourth medium size mission of ESA, ARIEL (https://arielmission.space/). My heartfelt congratulations to Michel and Didier ! The world needs such scientists with vision and enthusiasm. Bravo et à bientôt !
You know by now that I’m very interested in hot-air balloons (or Montgolfière as they were called by reference to their inventors, the Montgolfier brothers who lived during the second half of the 18th century in France). I imagined them roaming around Titan, but as said before, we have to wait and see when that happens. As everyone understands these days, money is hard to come by and a study for a Titan Montgolfière would be rather costly… How much? Probably several millions of Euros. But in 1787, King Louis XVI gave a sum of 40000 English livres (or pounds) to M. de Montgolfier as an advance payment for the construction of a new aerostat (as the attached document from the French archives testifies). What would that mean in today’s money I wonder? And could it bring us closer to flying around Titan????
We have finally recently found out which way things are planned to go for future exploration into the Outer Solar System. The decision from the two agencies (NASA and ESA) was posted on:
For myself, the excitement I have felt during the past 15 months continues. During that time, I have had the immense pleasure and honor to work, exchange ideas and argue with people from all over the world over the most fascinating subject ever: a future mission to return to the Saturnian system to hunt down information on fascinating aspects like Titan’s atmosphere and surface, Enceladus geysers and Saturn’s magnetosphere. Actually, the adventure had started even earlier for me, when we were preparing the proposal for Tandem within the framework of ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 or the study of the 2007 Flagship Titan Explorer mission. With the help and enthusiasm from friends and colleagues and in general from Titan exploration afficionados, I think I’m ready to continue towards the exploration of the Outer Solar System with a first stop at Jupiter and then on to Saturn.
As you can see from my feature article, I am very much involved in the preparation studies for future space explo-ration of our Solar System. Besides Pluto (recently demoted to a dwarf planet to be studied NASA’s mission New Horizons), the two largest giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn (Zeus and Kronos for the Greeks…) are major targets for the coming years. Studies for two ambitious concepts were performed in 2008, one mission was called Tan-dEM/TSSM heading for Saturn’s system, and another was Laplace/EJSM, targetting Jupiter’s system, both evolving from the original proposals to ESA and NASA into fully-blown architectures for challenging science return in a col-laboration among the agencies that would have matched the excellent Cassini-Huygens achievements.
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission was recently selected by ESA as the first large mission within the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan. It is being developed to address questions regarding the Jupiter system and its satel-lites, with a focus on the largest moon, Ganymede. By thoroughly exploring the system and thereby unravelling the history of its evolution, from initial formation of the planet to the development of its satellite system, we will gain a general understanding of how gas giant planets and their satellite systems form and evolve and of how our Solar System works.
I’m sure you’ve all seen the movie GRAVITY, otherwise you’re not really so interest in space or such rocket-freaks as I am. If you haven’t, what follows includes spoilers…
Some of my friends who saw it said it was excellent but hated the suspense. Others the ending, my friend Isabelle hated the disappearance of Clooney so soon, but then again Isabelle so looooooves Clooney (which is why she and I are still good friends, I’m simply craaaaaazy about Pitt and Cruise…)
