Between her stay at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in Garafía (La Palma), where Julia de León was gathering data for her PhD thesis on over a hundred asteroids, and the NASA space missions in which she is now involved, there have been years of enormous effort and observations. In La Palma she began to specialize in the mineral composition of asteroids, and as the years have passed her research is still oriented towards discovering what is happening on objects which are a thousands of kilometres from us, to understand better what is happening here on Earth. Today this researcher at

If asteroids do not emit light, a source of primordial information in Astrophysics, how are their properties studied? Karri Muinonen, professor of astronomy at the University of Helsinki (Finland), is precisely a specialist in the physical characterization of these small bodies, key to know the origin and evolution of the Solar System. For this reason, at the XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), this researcher will explain how they are analyzed, both from Earth and from space. By Elena Mora (IAC) “Near-Earth

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko may seem to be a bit of a tonguetwister, and difficult to remember, but Michael Küppers, an astrophysicist who qualified at Göttingen University (Germany) spends most of his time dealing with it. From 2007 he has been at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Madrid, analyzing the data gathered by the Rosetta mission to the comet of that name. He is also a member of the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) which, if approved during the coming December, will be the first time tht a mission has the aim of investigating an asteroid