For the First Time Ever, Organic Material Essential for Life was Found in an Asteroid with Queenie Chan

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Queenie Chan is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a planetary scientist. Her work involves the study of extraterrestrial materials and working with space missions, in order to understand the origins of our own planet Earth, its water, and organics.

Dr. Chan received her BSc degree from the University of Hong Kong and Ph.D. in Imperial College London. In 2013, she received a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, through which she worked alongside NASA curators at Johnson Space Center. Her work has created a significant international impact as it was the first to identify organics alongside liquid water in minute amounts of meteorite samples – the Zag and Monahans meteorites.

Dr. Chan returned to the UK in 2015. She worked with the Ptolemy instrument PI of the Europe-led Rosetta mission to decipher the data, and she has also begun involving in the Japan-led Hayabusa2 mission, by investigating meteorite analogues of the target asteroid Ryugu.

In 2019, Dr. Chan led an international team to analyse a particle—nicknamed "Amazon"— returned by the first Hayabusa space mission. She and her team published a paper in Scientific Reports with profound impact as they have successfully confirmed for the first-time indigenous organics in the Hayabusa sample. This year (2021) in February, a rare carbon-rich meteorite named Winchcombe fell in the UK, and Dr. Chan will be leading a team of scientific experts in unraveling the organic composition of this rare meteorite. Dr. Chan is currently on review boards to assess proposals and determine the allocation of astromaterials for novel analyses. She devotes to share her passion for science as a scientist and an educator.

Check out Dr. Chan’s university personal page: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/queenie-hoi-shan-chan(3827caaa-7abf-4b95-a81a-3d1ba4405a0c).html for more information.

Connect with Dr. Chan on LinkedIn.