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During 2023, IAS was able to test 3 Flight cameras (PFM, FM4, FM5) at the Calibration Station. The last camera was finished testing in the second week of December. All of the tests of these cameras took a little over 6 months, during which thermal vacuum tests were carried out as well as scientific performance tests. A team of about twenty people from IAS and the Station worked to enable these tests. Congratulations to all for this major achievement!
In December 2020, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back to Earth 5.4 grams of samples from the primitive asteroid Ryugu. These grains were collected in two locations, with one collection after an artificial impact that excavated subsurface material. The entire collection is being analysed at JAXA’s Curation Facility (Sagamihara, Japan), under a controlled atmosphere to prevent contamination of the samples by the terrestrial atmosphere.
A last minute modification of the EUI (Extreme Utraviolet Imager) instrument on board the Solar Orbiter mission provides new views of our star's corona. The corona is a very tenuous medium and dedicated telescopes called coronagraphs are needed to observe it. FSI (Full Sun Imager), the wide angle channel of EUI, is the first coronagraph imaging in the extreme UV.
Euclid’s two instruments have captured their first test images. The mesmerising results indicate that the space telescope will achieve the scientific goals that it has been designed for – and possibly much more.
Although there are months to go before Euclid delivers its true new view of the cosmos, reaching this milestone means the scientists and engineers behind the mission are confident that the telescope and instruments are working well.
Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. The preferred mechanism is water-bearing asteroids bombarding the surface of a young planet. An international research team involving scientists from IAS has just discovered water in the inner disk of the young star PDS 70, well inside of the orbit of two growing giant planets.
