Michael R. Combi

Scientific Interests


Dr. Combi is and has been the Principal Investigator on numerous NASA research projects. He is a Co-Investigator on the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) team for the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. He was a Team Member on the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer instrument on NASA's Comet Rendezvous Asteriod Flyby mission. He has been a Guest Observer with the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). His HST program involved ultraviolet spectroscopy and imaging of comet Hyakutake, the bright comet of 1996. His current research efforts include the recent development of the first time-dependent multidimensional multispecies fully kinetic model for the cometary atmosphere using Direct Simulation Monte Carlo methods. Dr. Combi also has major analysis collaborations with ground-based comet observing programs, and has been a Guest Investigator with the comet observing campaign of the SWAN (Solar Wind ANisotropies) instrument on the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) satellite. Click here for some neat SWAN pictures.


Please send your questions and/or comments to mcombi@umich.edu.

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