Franck Marchis

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Franck Marchis (born April 06, 1973 in Caen) Astronomer and Planetary Scientist is best-known for his discovery and characterization of multiple asteroids.

1 Background
2 Discoveries
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Background

Marchis was born in France. He is currently an assistant research Astronomer at University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in 2000 from university of Toulouse, France in planetary science. Although his thesis was performed while living in several places: Mexico, France, Great-Britain; the main part of his studies were made while working at La Silla observatory in Chile for the European Southern Observatory, an intergovernmental organization aiming to develop astronomy in the southern hemisphere. He participated in the development of ovservations with the first adaptive optics system available to a large community (called ADONIS on the 3.6m telescope). He moved to California shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in November 2000 through a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley. Since then he dedicates most of his activity monitoring Io's volcanism with the Keck-10m telescope and the support of CfAO, an NSF science and technology center. In 2003, he was hired as an assistant researcher to conduct his research more independently and expanded it to a broader field, but still based on high angular resolution capabilities. He has also taught on several occasions "The Planets" class at UC-Berkeley (Astro 12). He is associate astronomer at Observatoire de Paris, IMCCE. (ref [1])

[edit] Discoveries

Marchis exploited the high-resolution capabilities offered by adaptive optics from groundbased telescope to survey hundreds of main belt asteroids and Trojans. Together with his team, they announced the discovery of the first triple asteroid system in August 2005 (87 Sylvia), and the first measurement of a Trojan bulk-density in February 2006 (617 Patroclus). Both discoveries were published in Nature journal (ref [2], [3])

In July 2006, Marchis and his team announced the discovery of a moonlet companion arounf 624 Hektor using the Keck Laser Guide Star AO system (ref [4]). This is the first multiple system in the L4 swarm and the first moonlet companion in the Trojan discovered.