Colin Pillinger Scientist

Colin Trevor Pillinger, CBE FRS FRAS FRGS (/ˈpɪlɪndʒər/; 9 May 1943 – 7 May 2014) was an English planetary scientist.He was a founding member of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at Open University in Milton Keynes, he was also the principal investigator for the British Beagle 2 Mars lander project, and worked on a group of Martian meteorites.Pillinger played a pivotal role in the Rosetta mission which successfully made its rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014. He advocated deploying the lander Philae to conduct scientific experiments in situ, and was instrumental in getting the Ptolemy device accepted as part of the science payload.