Dr Chrysa Avdellidou

About

Hypervelocity impacts, asteroids(and meteors) and the combination of both.

Research interests

My scientific interests involve hypervelocity impacts, asteroids(and meteors) and the combination of both. The study involves impacts in small scales to understand the contamination of asteroid surfaces with exogenous material and also the asteroid families which are products of large scale catastrophic collisions.

Professional

Past Research Experience/Projects
2018 - present: Research Fellow, TOP group, Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Universite Côte d'Azur (2018-2020)

The project is focused on the collection of data of asteroid physical properties and help towards the construction of a massive asteroid database. This is hosted at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and will contain diameters, masses, albedos, spectroscopic class, spin states, family membership etc. Such database is opening a new era in asteroid studies enabling massive retrieval of asteroid data for sampling and correlation.

2016 - 2018: Research Fellow, Science Support Office, ESTEC, European Space Agency (2016-2018)

One of my projects at ESTEC was focused on the analysis of lunar observations of impact flashes. In this pioneer project, it was the first time that the temperature of flashes was measured. This measurement, together with the link of the impacting bodies (near-Earth Objects) either to meteor streams or the background population, lead to a more precise estimation of their masses and sizes. Hypervelocity impact experiments were performed in the Impact Lab of the University of Kent, where simulant materials were used in order to study the lunar impacts in small scale. In parallel, a second large project was focused on characterisation of asteroid families and the contamination of asteroid surfaces due to delivered materials from the nearby families.