Inga Kamp

 

I’m a Hubble Space Telescope associate astronomer for the European Space Agency here in Baltimore.  I was born in Vechta in Germany and come from an engineering family.  I got into astronomy late and hadn’t used a telescope until I was doing physics at university.  I went into Astronomy after my intermediate exam and did my PhD and first postdoc at Kiel University. With a European fellowship, I went to work at Leiden Observatory in Holland. Since March 2004, I have been working for ESA at STScI in Baltimore.  When people ask me what I have actually done here, I say that I have increased our understanding of the chemistry of protoplanetary disks. 

 

 

 In my spare time I like to read or go hiking.  I am married, my husband is a banker.  We like to walk in the mountains; the Appalachians are near here.  And I also like to watch the animals.  I haven’t made any proposals to use Hubble Space Telescope for myself yet because there is lots of archive material to research with.   I have worked with Hubble's STIS data of old protoplanetary disks (transition to planetary systems) to constrain the gas mass in the disk.   HST is very capable of showing us young stars and their protoplanetary disks, like we see them in Orion and other star forming regions. The irradiation by the central star and by surrounding bright stars influences the shape and the chemistry of these protoplanetary disks. I am currently working on a new HST proposal to study circumstellar matter with a coronagraph.

 

See my homepage:

http://www-int.stsci.edu/~kamp/