Patrick Michel (born 25 February 1970 in Saint-Tropez, France) is a French planetary scientist, Senior Researcher Exceptionnal Class at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Project Scientist at the European Space Agency (in the Human and Robotic Exploration programme) and working within the Lagrange laboratory, itself under the supervision of Université Côte d'Azur, Côte d'Azur Observatory and CNRS, in Nice (France). He is also a Global Fellow of the University of Tokyo.
Career Michel began his advanced education with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and Space Techniques in 1993 at ESTACA. He holds a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies (French for advanced studies diploma) in Imaging, Astronomy, and High Angular Resolution since 1994 and he received his PhD in 1997 for a thesis titled "Dynamical evolution of Near-Earth Asteroids", both at Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis. He then obtained his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (French for accreditation to supervise research) in 2004. Recruited at the CNRS in 1999 as a Chargé de Recherche, he was promoted to the Corps des Directeurs de Recherche in 2010. He is afterwards promoted to Director of Research in Exceptional Class in 2025. He is a specialist in the physical properties and evolution of asteroids, the process of collisions between small celestial bodies and the behavior of their surfaces under the appropriate gravity conditions. His research is mainly carried out by the development of massive numerical simulations of the processes involved (impacts, surface movements made of granular material, gravitational evolution). He also contributes to the development of experiments, in laboratory or in micro-gravity, whose purpose is to validate numerical simulations before applying them to astrophysical problems at scales inaccessible in the laboratory (e.g. asteroids with kilometric sizes). He has scientific responsibility or is heavily involved in space missions to asteroids, launched, under development and planned. He also participates in international forums dedicated to planetary defence and the development of a coordinated response to the risk of asteroid impact. He actively contributes to the mediatisation of knowledge in these fields by participating in television, radio and internet broadcasts, giving numerous conferences and writing articles in mainstream newspapers and encyclopaedias. He is editor-in-chief of the book Asteroids IV, published in December 2015 (University of Arizona Press), which reviews the science of asteroids in 42 chapters and serves as a reference for students and researchers during the current decade, and two public books in French devoted to asteroids and planetary defense, published by Odile Jacob's.
Academic topics
He is specialist of the physical properties and the collisional and dynamical evolution of asteroids. His researches focus on the collisional processes between asteroids, the origin of near-Earth objects, binary asteroids, their physical properties, their response to various processes (impacts, tidal encounters, shaking) as a function of their internal and surface properties, and the risks of impacts with the Earth. His work was notably the first to produce simulations that fully represent the process of an asteroid's destruction by collision with another object, calculating not only the fragmentation of the asteroid due to the impact but also the gravitational interactions of the fragments formed and their possible re-accumulations. The numerical simulations by Patrick Michel and his colleagues confirmed in particular that asteroid families (around twenty distinct groups of objects identified in the region between Mars and Jupiter, known as the asteroid belt) are each the result of the destruction of a parent body (up to several hundred kilometres in diameter). They also suggest that most second-generation asteroids (derived from a larger body) are aggregates rather than monolithic rocks, which explains the low bulk densities measured by observations. His results have been the subject of more than 600 publications, 108000 reads and 18000 citations in refereed international journals, and have been featured on the covers of both Science in 2001 and Nature in 2003. In particular, Patrick contributed to the development of a digital model of porous body fragmentation (comets, carbonaceous asteroids), validated by laboratory impact experiments conducted in Japan. His research published in Nature in 2008 also provided an explanation for the origin of small binary asteroids, which make up 15% of the asteroid population, and their particular physical properties, notably the shape of the central body.
Participations in spacecraft missions Michel is also deeply involved in several space missions and mission concepts devoted to the investigation of the Solar System small bodies and asteroid hazard, also known as planetary defence.
NEOMAP committee and Don Quijote He belongs to the Near-Earth Object Mission Advisory Panel (NEOMAP) mandated by European Space Agency (ESA) to recommend space missions devoted to a better understanding of the impact threat. In 2004, the committee recommends the Don Quijote mission concept, which consists in making a test of asteroid deflection by using the technique of an artificial impactor. This mission was studied at ESA until 2007.
MarcoPolo-R He was a co-chair of the science study team of the MarcoPolo-R sample return mission during the assessment study phase (2011-2014) selected by ESA's Cosmic Vision programme (2015-2025). The objective was to bring back a sample from a primitive near-Earth asteroid in partnership with NASA. The pre-phase A study took place from 2011 to 2014, but ESA did not select the project for launch.
AIDA, DART, AIM and Hera
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