Astrobiologist Zita Martins was invited to lead the European Space Agency (ESA) group to advise on science and exploration of the Solar System. She will be the first Portuguese woman to lead this international team of ESA scientists and she could not be more honored and proud.
“There has been growth in the industry, it has been decades of work” and at this point “Portugal is at the forefront” in this area, says Zita Martins, who has always dreamed of taking the “national flag to the highest level.” “.
Starting in January and until 2026, the astrobiologist will be responsible for the ESA group that will evaluate the space losses already approved and proposals for future plans, for example, for a miss planned for 2050, with the objective of studying the future plans. Solar system.
Zita Martins began working on space missions 20 years ago and already participated in a Japanese mission that brought samples from an asteroid to Earth. But the astrobiologist is already participating in other ESA missions, which will observe the atmospheres of 1,000 extrasolar planets (Ariel) and collect information about a comet that has never approached the Sun (Comet Interceptor).
This mission, Comet Interceptor, wants to understand, from a “very primitive sample”, a piece of ice that never approached the Sun, “what the initial conditions of the solar system were, like a trip to the past.”
With the Ariel mission “we will study the atmospheres of a thousand extrasolar planets.” A job that Zita Martins compares to that of “a detective.” These two missions are scheduled to launch in 2029.
Source: TSF
