Portraits of Bernese Space Researchers

Kathrin Altwegg studied and earned her doctorate at the University of Basel. When the physicist came to the University of Bern in 1982, she worked on the Giotto mission to Halley's Comet. Kathrin Altwegg developed the ground software for the mass spectrometer on board the space probe.

Later, she was project manager and ultimately head of the Rosina experiment, which explored comet Chury aboard the Rosetta space probe. She taught as a professor and was director of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern. She has been retired since 2016 but continues to conduct research.

While working on his dissertation at the University of Bern, Hans Balsiger collaborated with Ernest Kopp to develop a mass spectrometer for space travel.

After spending some time in the USA, he returned to Bern in 1970.

Among other things, he was project manager for an instrument that flew into space with the ESA satellite program GEOS and was principal investigator responsible for the mass spectrometer on board the comet probe Giotto and ROSINA on Rosetta until he retired in 2003.

In his thesis at the University of Bern, Peter Bochsler studied meteorites. For his doctoral thesis, he sawed, heated, and analyzed samples of moon rock brought back by the Apollo 11 and 12 astronauts.

After a research stay in Israel, he returned to the University of Bern and was involved in several space missions.

For example, he initiated a foil experiment on the Russian space station MIR. He was responsible for an experiment that has been providing data on solar wind aboard the SOHO solar probe since 1995, and he analyzed and interpreted data from NASA's GENESIS probe.

Otto Eugster studied at the University of Bern and developed a method for measuring meteorites in his doctoral thesis. During a research stay in the USA at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he examined moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts for the first time.

He then analyzed moon rocks from the Apollo and Luna missions at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France and finally at the University of Bern, before returning to meteorite research and ultimately developing a method for dating ancient gold objects.

Jürg Meister studied physics at the University of Bern and played a key role in the development of the Bern solar sail as a doctoral student. Using a solar wind simulator, he was able to demonstrate in the laboratory that the particles he was looking for actually remained trapped in the aluminum foil as hoped – the ingeniously simple idea worked.

In 1969, the 30-year-old physicist took the solar wind experiment intended for Apollo 11 to the US in his hand luggage. He then spent six years researching at Rice University in Texas before returning to Switzerland to work for the Thun ammunition factory.

Ernest Kopp studied physics at the University of Bern. As part of his doctoral thesis, he developed a measuring device that was first launched in 1967 from Sardinia using a Zenit high-altitude research rocket. This device made it possible to determine the density and temperature of the upper atmosphere at altitudes between 90 and 140 km.

Ernest Kopp subsequently led campaigns for altitude research experiments in Sweden, France, Spain, and the USA. He played a key role in the development of miniaturized, robust mass spectrometers for satellites and space probes – the specialty of Bernese space researchers.

Claude Nicollier was the only Swiss astronaut at the time of the interview. He was born in Vevey in 1944, studied physics and astrophysics in Lausanne and Geneva, and trained as a military and commercial pilot. In 1978, ESA selected him for the first group of European astronauts. Between 1992 and 1999, he took part in four space flights.

He spent over 1,000 hours in space. During a spacewalk lasting more than eight hours, he installed new instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. Claude Nicollier has been a professor at ETH Lausanne since 2004.

Urs Schwab completed an apprenticeship as a physics laboratory assistant at the University of Bern. In 1967, during his second year of training, he joined the team that developed and set up the Bern Solar Wind Experiment for the Apollo flights to the moon. Urs Schwab was involved in the production and preparation of the foil and the measurements in the laboratory.

Later, he was responsible for operating the mass spectrometer laboratory. In 1973, he left the University of Bern and went on a trip around the world. Back in Bern, he returned to the physics institute for another 17 years, working primarily on the expansion of the clean room.