Named in honor of Jean-Loup Bertaux (1942– ), French planetary scientist and head of the Department of Solar System Studies at the Service d’Aéronomie of the Centre National de Recherche Spatiale. Since 1964 Bertaux has played a crucial role in space-mission exploration of the solar system, acting in collaboration with his American and Russian colleagues. He was the first to map a hydrogen cloud around a comet, and in 1975 he discovered the interstellar wind in the solar system. Bertaux has been involved in several experiments on the Vega mission to comet 1P/Halley and in other missions to study Venus, Mars, the earth and the sun. (M 27459) _ _.