Swiss Review 3/2019

Swiss Review / May 2019 / No.3 9 Berne in space Notable space projects with Bernese involvement: 1986: The Giotto probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) flies to Halley’s Comet in 1986. On board is a University of Berne spectrometer carrying out the first-ever close-proximity study of a comet’s dust and gas. 1990: Launch of the joint ESA/NASA Ulysses mission. The Ulysses probe observes the sun over a prolonged period of years, using a Swiss-made instrument to study the solar wind. 1995: Launch of the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). On board is Celias, a highly sensitive ion mass spectrome- ter from Berne. 2004: Launch of the ESA probe Rosetta. The probe reaches comet Churyumov-Gerasim- enko (Chury) ten years later, keeping it company for two subsequent years. The spectrometers developed in Berne function perfectly. 2016: The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter begins its journey to Mars. CaSSIS – the University of Berne’s specially developed camera system – has been producing high-resolution colour images of the red planet’s surface over the past year. 2018: The BepiColombo probe sets off for Mercury – a joint venture between the ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The University of Berne developed and built an on-board instrument designed to produce a three-dimensional map of Mercury’s surface. 2019: CHEOPS, the space telescope for observing planets outside our solar system (exoplanets), is set to launch in the second half of the year. The University of Berne oversaw its construction. sition Experiment and the boost it gave Berne. At the beginning of the 1990s, Zurbuchen worked in Berne – incidentally as one of Peter Bochsler’s PhD students – on the development of an instrument for an American solar probe. “It was a direct descendent of the SWC,” he says. As NASA’s top sci- entist, Zurbuchen currentlymanages a budget of almost USD sevenmillion. His decisions have implications for around 10,000 scientists and engi- neers. Off to Mars? And now? Half a century since Apollo 11, the possibility of a return to the moon and a mission to Mars is on everyone’s lips. NASA is at the fore- front, although the issue is a conten- tious one. Bochsler and his former student have differing opinions. Zur- buchen knows that opponents would say that there are other, urgent mat- ters to attend to on Earth, and that manned missions are considerably risky andmuch too expensive anyway. Yet he believes it is human nature to aim high and push the limits of what is possible. “Why do we want to go Mars?” he asks, before answering his own question. “Because we can.” He points out that you can never predict the good that can come of such ven- tures either. When the first probes shot into space in the middle of the last century, no one had thought yet of satellites that record climate data or play an essential role in modern weather forecasting. “We at NASA do the most accurate global CO 2 meas- urements,” Zurbuchen says. He also thinks that science brings people to- gether. “For me it is one of the key rea- sons why we gravitate to these pro- jects in the first place.” Bochsler acknowledges the argu- ments in favour of human space flight. The lunar rocks that the astronauts brought back 50 years ago were of great scientific value, he concedes. “I was one of the scientists who handled quite a lot of them,” says Bochsler, who goes on to praise NASA, explain- ing that the US space agency distrib- uted the rocks generously to research centres around the world. Neverthe- less, he believes that unmanned probes probably would have achieved much the same findings. In his view, the immense outlay needed to fund manned projects – “often for nothing more than reasons of prestige” – in- evitably means less money being available for programmes of poten- tially much more immediate scien- tific benefit. When Bochsler sees pho- tomontages of colonies on Mars, he wonders howmany “beautiful exper- iments” would be possible on un- manned missions using the same amount of money. Andwhat does JürgMeister think? Not much, if youmeanMars. “The red planet is so far away. Most people don’t even knowwhere it is in the night sky.” On the other hand, the moon means something to everyone. He believes we were quite right to fly there once. “No question.” But there is no need to do it again. “We’ve known what it looks like up there for the last 50 years.” Related article : www.ogy.de/s wiss-universe DÖLF BARBEN IS EDITOR AT THE NEWSPAPER “DER BUND” IN BERN Switzerland’s most powerful scientist: Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Adminis- trator for NASA’s Science Mission Di- rectorate. Photo: Keystone