Sylvestre Maurice

IRAP / CNRS, UNIVERSITE DE TOULOUSE, CNES

Astrophysicien-planétologue

Description

Sylvestre MAURICE is an astrophysicist-planetologist at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP/ CNRS, Univ. Toulouse, CNES), specialising in the exploration of the Solar System. He has worked on numerous space missions to study Jupiter/Saturn (Voyager, Cassini), Mars (Odyssey, Curiosity, ExoMars, Perseverance, Zhurong), Mercury (Messenger, BepiColombo) and the Moon (Prospector, Smart-1, Selene, Chandrayaan-1). With his American colleagues, he helped to discover ice at the poles of the Moon (1998) and Mercury (2011), as well as on the surface of Mars (2004). For NASA's Curiosity rover, he designed ChemCam, the first French instrument on Mars, which helped to demonstrate the past habitability of the Red Planet (2013). He designed the SuperCam instrument that will be used on NASA's Perseverance rover, which will be on Mars in 2021. He is co-author of more than 240 scientific articles and a scientific expert at the Cité de l'Espace in Toulouse.