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Friday June 2nd was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first ESA probe towards another planet, Mars. A celebration was held at the ESA control center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Several colleagues from IAS were there representing the laboratory and the OMEGA team.
An international research team involving the IAS has just revealed the chemical composition of a disk of matter rotating around a young star, where new planets are forming. The results of this study, led by Benoît Tabone, a CNRS researcher at the IAS, were obtained in the framework of the guaranteed time programme of the MIRI instrument developed by a consortium of laboratories in Europe and the United States.
The launch of the JUICE mission was carried out perfectly thanks to the penultimate Ariane 5, Friday April 14, 2023 at 2:14 p.m. Paris time. The first crucial hours of the mission, which included the first communication signals with the spacecraft, first TC and deployment of the solar panels took place nominally. Direction Jupiter and its icy moons!
A new study, based on spectral data from the MicrOmega instrument on the samples brought back from the Ryugu asteroid by the JAXA mission Hayabusa2, helped to characterize and map different types of carbonate minerals within the samples, revealing precious information about the early Solar System.
Best wishes for 2023 from the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale !
The electronic greeting card can be found here.
