Excellence with passion
About
I am a researcher at ISAE-SUPAERO and part of the Space Systems for Planetary Applications (SSPA) team. I have a first class MPhys degree in Astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh (2007) and a PhD in Physics and Planetary Sciences from the Open University and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis/Côte d’Azur Observatory (2012).
I have an active role in several planetary science and planetary defense space missions: I’m a collaborator for the NASA InSight mission and for the Mars 2020 mission, specifically the SuperCam microphone onboard the Perseverance rover. I’m also a member of the NASA DART mission Investigation Team, have a leadership role in the ESA Hera mission, and am the Principle Investigator for an instrument (the WheelCams) onboard the CNES/DLR Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) rover that will be deployed to Phobos by the JAXA MMX mission.
My research interests are linked to understanding the physical properties and geophysical evolution of asteroids and terrestrial planets. I also study how space instrumentation interacts with the surface environment of planetary bodies in order to prepare inter-planetary space missions and to allow the most precise interpretation of the data possible.
For the most up to date list of publications please see ORCID or Web of Science.
News
July 10 2023
Just published, a new podcast for France Info about the exploration of asteroids. Listen here.
July 5 2023
Today we had the final review of our European Commission H2020 NEO-MAPP project in Brussels. Congratulations to all of the NEO-MAPP team for the amazing amount of work over the last years. It has been a pleasure working with you all!
June 30 2023
Happy asteroid day!
What would it be like to walk on the surface of asteroid Dimorphos?
“The boulders covering the surface of Dimorphos are much bigger than they might look,” says planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch of ISAE-Supaero in France, working on the CubeSat landings. “At around 5-7 m across, the largest ones are typically house-sized.”
Find out more in this article on the ESA website.
June 26 2023
Last week I was lucky enough to visit Meteor Crater in Arizona (a 1-mile wide crater former by an asteroid impact 50,000 years ago). I’m glad we have space missions like DART and Hera that will help to avoid this happening again!
June 21 2023
The rover MMX has a name: IDEFIX. Why? Well the first french satelite (launched in 1965) was called Asterix and now the first french rover is called Idefix (this is the name of Asterix’s dog Dogmatix in French).
June 20 2023
Congratulations to my student Alexia Duchene for presenting her excellent master’s thesis work at the Asteroids, Comets and Meteors conference in Flagstaff, Arizona!
June 19 2023
MMX, rover en préparation !
June 12 2023
Honored to be giving a conference on the mission DART at the Cîté de l’Espace for the "Association des Amis de la Cité de l’espace" this evening.
May 24 2023
Two new articles just published with exciting results from the Mars Microphone! The first, led by Alex Stott, shows how the microphone can be used as a wind sensor. The second, led by Baptsite Chide, analyses the propagation of sound in the Martian atmosphere.
May 18 2023
Want to learn more about the science objectives of the MMX rover that will land and drive on the Martian moon Phobos?
Take a look at this paper lef by Stephan Ulamec that has just been published. :)
The MMX rover has just completed the thermal vacuum tests at CNES. For more information see here.
April 20 2023
DART made the cover of Nature! All the papers are open access and can be found here.
"In this week’s issue, five papers explore the test and the effects of the collision. One paper reconstructs the impact; a second looks at the change to Dimorphos’s orbit caused by the impact. A third paper reports observations from the Hubble Space Telescope of the material ejected during the collision. A fourth paper uses modelling to characterize the transfer of momentum that resulted from the impact. And the final paper reports on citizen science observations before, during and after the collision."
Well done to all the DART team.
April 15 2023
What does the the Ingenuity helicopter sound like on Mars?
Find out in this paper led by R. Lorenz. :)
The image (from Lorenz et al., 2023) shows the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars shortly after its deployment, observed at left in a mosaic of some 62 individual images acquired using an arm-mounted camera (WATSON) on April 6, 2021 (Sol 46). The mosaic also shows the remote sensing mast at the right, including the Supercam mast unit and its microphone. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems.
March 14 2023
Last night I be participated in my first ever live chat show, Clique on Canal+ along side Juliet Armanet! Quite an experience....
March 3 2023
The fear that the sky could one day fall on our heads dates back to the dawn of time because the impact of an asteroid or a comet could dramatically change life on Earth in a fraction of a second. The dinosaurs have already experienced this. Does the same fate threaten the human species?
Find out in this ARTE documentary (in french) for which I was interviewed: Le ciel va-t-il nous tomber sur la tête ?.
Also available on YouTube until the 04/03/2026.
March 1 2023
The DART impact results have been published today in a series of 4 papers in Nature. See more on the NASA press release:
NASA’s DART Data Validates Kinetic Impact as Planetary Defense Method
February 14 2023
It was a pleasure to participate (alongside Pooneh Maghoul, Philippe Lognonné and Pierre Delage) in a webinar for ’Le Comité Français de Mécanique des Sols et de Géotechnique’ about extraterrestrial soil mechanics. You can see the 4 invited talks here.
January 10 2023
New year, new role... I’m honoured to have been invited by JGR: Planets to join their team as an Associate Editor.
JGR: Planets is proud to welcome new Associate Editor Naomi Murdoch, from ISAE/SUPAERO. #AGUpubs @AGUPlanetary https://t.co/f1DzmVL8vr Dr. Murdoch studies the physical properties and geophysical evolution of asteroids and terrestrial planets. pic.twitter.com/hnqENPhyJm
— JGR-Planets (@jgrplanets) January 9, 2023
December 15 2022
Check out this great blog article written by Alex Stott about Listening to dust devils on Mars.
December 13 2022
Just published, our article in Nature Communications describing the first ever sound recording of a dust devil on Mars!
October 27 2022
NASA’s InSight Lander Detects Stunning Meteoroid Impact on Mars!
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
NASA’s InSight lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake last year, but scientists learned only later the cause of that quake: a meteoroid strike estimated to be one of the biggest seen on Mars since NASA began exploring the cosmos. What’s more, the meteoroid excavated boulder-size chunks of ice buried closer to the Martian equator than ever found before – a discovery with implications for NASA’s future plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet. More here.
Listen to the sonification of the impact seismic signal:
October 20 2022
October 14 2022
Ce soir (18h30) nous serons en direct de la Cité des sciences et de l’industrie à Paris pour parler des Missions DART et Hera, et comment dévier un astéroïde !
October 13 2022
Loving these beautiful constrast enhanced images of Didymos and Dimorphos just after the DART impact. Well done LICIACube/ASI!
Credit: LICIACube/ASI
October 11 2022
NASA Confirms DART Mission Impact Changed Asteroid’s Motion in Space!
Prior to DART’s impact, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. Since DART’s intentional collision with Dimorphos on Sept. 26, astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth to measure how much that time has changed. Now, the investigation team has confirmed the spacecraft’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, shortening the 11 hour and 55-minute orbit to 11 hours and 23 minutes. More here.
The aftermath of the DART Collision with Dimorphos was also captured by the SOAR Telescope [Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/SOAR/NSF/AURA/T. Kareta (Lowell Observatory), M. Knight (US Naval Academy]
October 10 2022
Looking forward to talking with the "Association des journalistes scientifiques de la presse d’information" tomorrow!
September 29 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a unique NASA experiment designed to intentionally smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid in the world’s first-ever in-space test for planetary defense. These observations of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact mark the first time that Webb and Hubble simultaneously observed the same celestial target. More here.
September 28 2022
Well done LICIACube and all of the team. The images of the DART impact are incredible!!! Image credits: ASI and the LICIACube team.
Learn more about the DART and Hera missions here:
September 27 2022
DART succesfully impacted aseroid Dimorphos at 1h14 (CEST) this morning. What an amazing night. Look at those images, look at that surface! Not only is the DART mission a HUGE success, but this is also the first time we’ve ever seen a binary asteroid up close.
September 26 2022
Tonight the DART spacecraft will smash into a 160 m asteroid at a speed of 24,000 km/hr. Why? To test our capacity to protect our planet if we ever discover an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Follow the first ever planetary defense test live on NASA TV starting at 11pm in the UK (midnight in France) on Monday 26th September: https://dart.jhuapl.edu/
September 19 2022
InSight ’Hears’ Its First Meteoroid Impacts on Mars. Check out the exciting paper just released in Nature Geosciences led by our SSPA team collegue Raphael Garcia and in video by NASA:
August 8 2022
Watch myself, Patrick Michel and others talk about planetary defence missions in the film Alerte aux astéroïdes by ARTE (in French)
July 18 2022
Just out - our new paper in GRL analysing the Martian atmospheric turbulence in which we show that the nocturnal near-surface environment of Mars can be more turbulent than expected and that turbulence is affected by the presence of dust storms and gravity waves.
July 15 2022
Our article describing the exciting ESA Hera mission, due for launch in 2024 has just been published in The Planetary Science Journal. See the Open Access paper here.
Image credit: ESA
July 7 2022
Asteroid Bennu Reveals its Surface is Like a Plastic Ball Pit
"The spacecraft would have sunk into Bennu had it not fired its thrusters to back away immediately after it grabbed dust and rock from the asteroid’s surface.
It turns out that the particles making up Bennu’s exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that if a person were to step onto Bennu they would feel very little resistance, as if stepping into a pit of plastic balls that are popular play areas for kids."
Read more about this great paper by Kevin Walsh and coauthors in the NASA press release here.
July 4 2022
Did you miss our Asteroid Day 2022 broadcast? Don’t worry, you can watch it again here. We start talking about asteroid characterisation about 2h30 into the broadcast.
June 30 2022
Happy Asteroid Day everyone.
Don’t forget to tune in to our LIVE broadcast from Luxembourg.
June 29 2022
Join us tomorrow, June 30 2022 for Asteroid Day LIVE 2022!.
May 10 2022
InSight Records Monster Quake on Mars!
Estimated to be magnitude 5, the quake is the biggest ever detected on another planet!!
See more in the NASA press release.
April 28 2022
Congratulations to Dr Cecily Sunday (my first PhD student!) on successfully defending her fantastic thesis on “Landing, sinking, and rolling on small body surfaces”.
April 19 2022
New paper just out investigating magnetic fields in Martian convective vortices. We find that close dusty vortices could cause magnetic field signals! See all the details here.
April 6 2022
A new podcast that I recorded with Campus in Space about the Hera mission has just been released (in french). Listen here.
April 1 2022
Hot off the press!
Our paper on the First Sounds on Mars, published today in Nature!
The press release can be found here.
Find out more about these exciting results:
- ISAE-SUPAERO video (in English)
- Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier video (in French)
March 29 2022
Exciting results from our Martian microphone are going to be published in the next few days! Here is SSPA team member Alex Stott preparing a video talking about the amazing science we can do with our little microphone.
February 10 2022
An excellent new paper by my PhD student Cecily Sunday just out demonstrating how to correctly take into account the low gravity environment when studying slow interactions. Check it out here.
January 13 2022
The International Workshop devoted to the Hera mission will take place in person in Nice on May 30-June 3, 2022, at the Hôtel Saint-Paul.
24 Nov. 2021
DART launch will be at 7:21am (UTC+1)
The launch can be followed online on the NASA live stream.
DART will impact asteroid Dimorphos between 26 Sept. and 1 Oct. 2022.
ESA’s HERA mission, will be launched in 2024, will investigate the aftermath of the DART impact.
October 9 2021
Si vous souhaitez avoir les dernières nouvelles des missions InSight et Perseverance voici une presentation de la Journée Portes Ouvertes à l’ISAE:
August 26 2021
I had the pleasure to discuss our Martian microphone with Florence Porcel. Check out the video:
July 24 2021
Thanks to InSight we now know the Martian internam structure. A series of three important papers were published in Science this week:
- Seismic detection of the martian core
- Upper mantle structure of Mars from InSight seismic data
- Thickness and structure of the martian crust from InSight seismic data
July 5 2021
What’s inside an asteroid? Find out from our Asteroid day panel discussion.
June 11 2021
We’re live on Twitch this lunchtime: "SuperCam : vive le vent martien !"
May 11 2021
I have to pleasure to have been invited to give a lecture about the InSight mission and results at the Institute of Physics this evening. It’s online, everyone is welcome! Details here.
May 6 2021
Looking forward to speaking about Perseverance at an Agile Rabbit event this evening.
April 22 2021
What are the challenges of landing on an asteroid?
Find out here.
April 16 2021
When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on Bennu back in October to collect a sample, footage showed that it seemed to pass through the asteroid, not land on it. In this Horizon video I talk about what happened during this amazing sampling event.
March 10, 2021
We are about to release the first ever audio recordings of Sounds on Mars using our SuperCam microphone!
Follow our press conference (French first then English):
And listen to the sounds for yourself here.
February 18, 2021
Mars 2020 Perseverance has landed safely on Mars!
Check out the amazing [footage of the Rover’s Descent and Touchdown on Mars:
December 6, 2020
Samples from the C-type asteroid 162173 Ryugu have been succesfully returned to Earth by Hayabusa2!
October 29, 2020
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Successfully Stows Sample of Asteroid Bennu
October 26, 2020
NASA Science Live: Our First Attempt to Sample Asteroid Bennu
July 30, 2020
Mars 2020 Perseverance is safely on its way to Mars!
June 30, 2020
Ever wondered what it would be like to be in the surface of an asteroid?
Find out here.
June 30, 2020
2020 ESA Asteroid Day Programme – French.
« A lively, animated discussion hosted by Bruce Benamran, one of France’s most-watched science youtubers. The programme will include discussions on asteroids, planetary defence missions and future opportunities in asteroid mining with six experts. Ian Carnelli (ESA), Patrick Michel (CNRS), Aurélie Moussi (CNES – the French Space Agency), Naomi Murdoch (ISAE-Supaero), Marc Serres (Luxembourg Space Agency) and ESA astronaut Léopold Éyharts will take part in a fascinating debate, shedding light on how asteroids first formed, presenting recent scientific findings and the challenges that still lie ahead. »
8 November 2018
Exciting times for asteroid space missions as Hayabusa-2 prepares for the 1st sampling attempt of Ryugu, and Bennu comes into view for OSIRIS-Rex.
11 October 2018
Presenting InSight and the Mars Microphone at the IRT Forum in Toulouse.
3 October 2018
And now MASCOT has safely landed on Ryugu too!! Here’s the first picture of asteroid Ryugu taken by mascot during the asteroid landing. You can see the shadow of the asteroid lander in the top right of the image ! (Image: Mascot / DLR / cnes)
27 September 2018
Click here to see an incredible movie taken on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu by one of the first ever asteroid landers (MINERVA-II1)!! So many boulders!
26 September 2018
On the 21st of September JAXA successfully put two small rovers (MINERVA-II1) onto the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. These rovers, part of the Hayabusa-2 mission, are the first surface packages to ever land on an asteroid! Well done JAXA!! Here is a photo was captured by Rover-1A on September 22 at around 11:44 JST. It was taken on Ryugu’s surface during a hop. The left-half is the surface of Ryugu, while the white region on the right is due to sunlight (JAXA/Hayabusa2 Project).
5 August 2018
The PIONEERS (Planetary Instruments based on Optical technologies for an iNnovative European Exploration using Rotational Seismology) project, led by members of the SSPA team here at ISAE-SUPAERO, has been funded by the European Commision as part of the H2020 call (H2020-SPACE-20-2018)! The team will develop an innovative optical seismometer that provides 6 degrees of freedom measurements (3 translational and 3 rotational). The instrument will be built specifically for planetary science missions, and a reduced scale version of the instrument specifically dedicated to the exploration of small bodies will also be developped. The PIONEERS project involves a consortium of research laboratories (ISAE-SUPAERO, ETHZ, IPGP, ORB, LMU) and an industrial partner (iXblue).
25 June 2018
Our Europlanet proposal to return to the Aarhus Mars wind tunnel to perform further experiments with our Mars 2020 Microphone has been funded! We’ll be heading back up to Denmark for a week of testing in 2019.
May 2018
The InSight mission to Mars launched successfully on Saturday 5th May 2018. Watch a video of the launch here. The landing on Mars is planned for 26th November 2018!
April 2018
Interested to hear more about some of our asteroid-related research activites? Have a listen to the interview I recorded for the Western University (Canada) Western Worlds podcast (thanks Jon Kissi!). The podcast can be downloaded here.
24 November 2017
We have another internship position open for 2018, this time in collaboration with the ’Département Aérodynamique Energétique et Propulsion’ at ISAE-SUPAERO and in relation to the Mars Microphone. The subject is studying the flow regimes in the wake of the Mars 2020 SuperCam instrument. Candidates should by in the final year of a Master of Sciences/Engineering degree and have competencies in fluid dynamics. Full details can be found here.
10 November 2017
Interested in coming to do a 5-6 month internship in our team studying the feasibility and performance of a wheel on the surface of a small body? Candidates should by in the final year of an Engineering or Master of Sciences/Engineering degree. There is also the possibility to continue on to a PhD at the end of the internship. Full details can be found here.
16 October 2017
Do you want to send your name to Mars with the InSight mission? If so, you can sign up and get your boarding card here: Send your name to Mars.
Last Day to Submit: November 1, 2017 (11:59 p.m. ET)
16 October 2017
To help us better understand spacecraft - planetary surface interactions, last week we had a great meeting at ISAE-SUPAERO focussed on slow penetration into granular materials in low gravity. Thanks to everyone for coming!
3 October 2017
The SSPA stand and public presentations in the center of Toulouse as part of the European Researchers’ Night on Friday 29th September 2017 were a huge success!
25 September 2017
We’re just back from a great EPSC conference in Riga where Gautier Nguyen (a Masters student working with me) and I presented papers about the Mars Microphone, the seismic pressure noise on Mars for the InSight mission, our new drop tower experiment results and also about asteroid seismology.
30 July 2017
The SEIS flight model has been delivered to Lockheed Martin in Denver! Integration of the instrument into the InSight spacecraft will begin in August.
12 July 2017
Our 6-hour Asteroid Day live broadcast was a huge success with several hundred thousand viewers around the world. If you missed it, you can see the different panel discussions on the asteroid day website here.
10 July 2017
We’re just back from a great week in Aarhus where we were testing the SuperCam laser and Mars Microphone system in a representative Mars environment. Thank you Europlanet for funding this important test campaign!
14 June 2017
Tune in on June 30th for our LIVE Asteroid Day broadcast! This will be the first-ever 24-hour live broadcast about space, and specifically asteroids.
https://blog.asteroidday.org/2017/05/30/asteroid-day-live-speakers/