André Balogh

Nationality: British

Professor Balogh was born in Hungary. He left his homeland in 1956 and continued his education in France, where he obtained the Diplome d'Ingénieur Civil des Télécommunications in 1964.

He then joined the Cosmic Ray Group in the Physics Department of Imperial College, London as a Fellow of the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO). From 1966, he was a member of the research staff that worked on energetic particle detectors for ESRO's early scientific satellites, ESRO 2 and HEOS 1 (the first European satellite with an orbit that reached into interplanetary space).

Since then, André Balogh has participated in numerous scientific space missions. Following the launch of HEOS-1 in 1968, he worked on the analysis of energetic solar particle data. In the early 1970s, using the experience gained with the HEOS instrument, Balogh designed the three-telescope low energy proton spectrometer for NASA's ISEE-3 mission. This instrument, built in cooperation with the Space Research Institute, Utrecht, and the Space Science Department of ESA, had a high time resolution (still unequalled today) for measuring the directional (pitch angle) distribution of low energy protons in space.

The data from the low energy particle spectrometer on ISEE-3 led to a series of papers on how particles gain energy by interacting with interplanetary shock waves.

Meanwhile, from 1977, Balogh and others were already working on two instruments (the magnetometer and an energetic particle detector) for the mission that was to become Ulysses, the first spacecraft to fly over the poles of the Sun. Ulysses was eventually launched in October 1990, leading to a long awaited harvest of discoveries on the properties of the heliospheric magnetic field away from the ecliptic plane. Over the past ten years, Balogh has contributed to many research publications based on Ulysses data.

Participation in the (later cancelled) NASA Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby mission led to development of a magnetometer for deep space missions, which is now flying on the Cassini Saturn orbiter mission. At the same time, the Cluster project started and, in 1987, Balogh became Principal Investigator for the magnetic field experiment.

After the Ariane-5 launch failure in June 1996, Balogh strongly supported the rebuilding of the Cluster mission. A new Cluster magnetometer team has now successfully redesigned and rebuilt the instruments that should provide a quantum leap in our understanding of the Earth's magnetosphere.

Aware through long experience that some space programmes need a long preparation, the Imperial College space research group is now involved in the ESA Rosetta Cometary Rendezvous mission that will only bring fruit from 2011. Balogh is also a strong advocate of an ESA mission to Mercury, in the hope of understanding its puzzling magnetic field.

As Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College, Balogh has taught undergraduate courses in space physics, instrumentation and control and electronics and supervised 11 postgraduate students on topics related to heliospheric phenomena.

	PI for EFW until 2000
	PI for FGM 2005 - 2012