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5 years 8 months ago
Two months prior to its separation, descent, and landing on the Churyumov-Gerasimenko nucleus, the Philae lander of the ESA Rosetta mission delivers its first images of the comet. The 7 micro-cameras of the CIVA instrument, designed and developed under IAS responsibility, will acquire the full 360° panorama of the landing site.
The first collection of cometary dust is initiated for the COSIMA mass spectrometer on-board Rosetta
5 years 9 months ago
The COSIMA instrument on board the Rosetta spacecraft will provide the first high resolution mass spectra of grains collected close to a comet. The imaging system of COSIMA, COSISCOPE, built by Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, will locate and characterize the collected cometary grains.
6 years 1 month ago
After a ten-year-long interplanetary journey, Rosetta finally approaches its final destination, the nucleus of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, on which the Philae module will land in November. The CIVA imaging system, designed to obtain a stereoscopic panoramic view of the surface of the comet after the landing of Philae, has just been turned on successfully, after years of hibernation, at a distance of more than 600 million km from the Sun.
6 years 3 months ago
From source to sink: Meteorites from Mars have been known since the 1970’s, but researchers in Oslo, In Lyon, and at IAS have for the first time been able to identify the source crater for shergottites, the largest group of martian meteorites. The source region on Mars was probably impacted about 3 million years ago by a medium-size body, and the meteorites ended their space journey at the Earth’s surface a few thousand years ago.
6 years 4 months ago
After a 31 months hibernation phase, the ROSETTA spacecraft has woken up as scheduled on January 20th. After this critical milestone, the spacecraft will progressively get closer to the comet, then it will get into orbit (end of June) so as to map it and to select a landing site for the Philae lander, which will reach the surface of the nucleus in November. IAS has contributed to 3 experiments on board the orbiter and the lander.