Mikael Granvik Speaker

professor
Luleå University of Technology / University of Helsinki

Mikael Granvik is Professor of Space Systems at Luleå University of Technology (LTU) in Kiruna, Sweden, and Associate Professor of Planetary Astrophysics at the University of Helsinki (UH) in Helsinki, Finland. He obtained his PhD from the UH in 2008 and subsequently spent 3 years at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, working on the Pan-STARRS asteroid survey. After returning to Europe, Prof. Granvik has led research teams at both LTU (Asteroid Engineering Lab) and UH, that combined currently include 2 senior researchers, and 3 doctoral students. His research focus is in general in planetary astrophysics and, more specifically, the physical and dynamical evolution and interconnections of small-body populations such as meteoroids and near-Earth objects (NEOs; asteroids and comets on orbits that approach or cross the orbit of the Earth). He is the initiator and lead-developer of OpenOrb, an open-source asteroid orbit-computation package, which is, for example, the backbone of the NEORanger system monitoring for imminent impactors among newly discovered NEOs. Prof. Granvik has been a member of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium of ESA’s Gaia mission since it was created. He is the Deputy of the Solar System Working Group within the Euclid Consortium, and a member of the science teams of NASA’s DART mission, ESA’s Hera mission, JAXA’s DESTINY+ mission to the active asteroid (3200) Phaethon, and asteroid-mining start-up Karman+'s High Frontier mission to a yet-to-be-specified NEO. As for ground-based asteroid surveys, he has been or is collaborating with the most productive surveys (such as Pan-STARRS, CSS). Prof. Granvik has Builder status in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and is a member of the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration where he contributes to the collection of NEO survey data with the largest and most powerful survey telescope ever built. Most notably Prof. Granvik has led studies that in 2012 predicted that the Earth is constantly surrounded by a cloud of small asteroids, temporarily captured from the much larger population of near-Earth asteroids, that in 2016 showed that NEOs undergo a super-catastrophic destruction at a non-trivial distance from the Sun, that in 2018 led to the publication of the state-of-the-art model describing the debiased orbit and size distributions of the NEO population, and that in 2024 revealed that NEOs are tidally disrupted during close encounters with the Earth and Venus. In total, his publication record includes 140 original research articles in international, peer-reviewed science journals. The articles have received more than 26,000 citations.