Highlights and latest news
The team has contributed to many important scientific results over the last few decades. This page presents three seminal discoveries and several recent publications.
1) Discovery of ancient minerals formed by liquid water on Mars
In the image above, infrared clay detections from the OMEGA instrument on the Mars Express mission are shown in blue on the right. These minerals testify to the presence of liquid water that has altered the oldest terrains on Mars, which only outcrop in certain places on the planet.
Figure taken from the 2005 article « Phyllosilicates on Mars and implications for early martian climate »
Voir également l’ouvrage de vulgarisation « Mars Planète bleue, Jean-Pierre Bibring, Odile Jacob, 2009 » ainsi que la vidéo suivante réalisée dans le cadre des 80 ans du CNRS : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a62gnrrJp4U&list=PL-GL80g2OlE0TFUR0L1zo31sAm4B0pt3R&index=1
2) Observation of the first transit of a super-Earth
This graph shows the light curve measured by the CoRoT satellite as it observed the CoRoT-7 exoplanet passing in front of its star. This is the first confirmed telluric exoplanet of Earth-like density
Figure taken from the 2009 article « Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission. VIII. CoRoT-7b: the first super-Earth with measured radius »
3) First images from the surface of a comet
This image is the first to be taken from the surface of a comet, by the CIVA instrument on the Philae lander of the ROSETTA mission. It shows the materials exposed on the comet's surface, which contain organic matter.
Figure taken from the 2015 article « 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko surface properties as derived from CIVA panoramic images »
See also the virtual reality tool developed around data from this mission:
As well as the following video produced for the 80th anniversary of the CNRS : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-DX36JbTcw&list=PL-GL80g2OlE0TFUR0L1zo31sAm4B0pt3R&index=2
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