October 23, 2024
The Collège de France will host a series of talks about the "Origin and evolution of the Solar System" by Alessandro Morbidelli (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Collège de France). Eight talks will be given between October 23 and December 11, and will include three additional invited seminars.
June 15, 2023
1.5 grams of lunar rock obtained by the Chang'e 5 sample return mission were given to the French scientific community during a visit of the French president in China. These samples were collected on the lunar surface in the region of Oceanus Procellarum, where some of the youngest lava flows erupted about 2 billion years ago. The samples will be curated by the national museum of natural history in Paris (Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle), which will be the site of a new national center for extraterrestrial materials.
April 24, 2023
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) launched friday April 14 from the Guiana Space Center, and one of the instruments onboard was MAJIS (Moons And Jupiter Imaging Spectrometer) that was developed by the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS). This image shows a picture of the Earth in the background and the MAJIS instrument in the foreground taken by the spacecraft's surveillance camera. The instrument will be turned on in just over a month, and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031.
March 2, 2023
The paper "Seismic detection of the Martian core" (2021) was awarded the 2023 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland prize for the best paper published in the journal Science. Lead by Simon Stähler and several members of the InSight science team, this paper provides the most precise estimate for the size of the Martian core. The InSight seismometer was developed by a consortium lead by CNES and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.
February 16, 2023
A meteorite was recovered from the asteroid 2023-CX1 that fell in Normandy France the morning of February 13, 2023. This was the third time in history where parts of a previously known asteroid were recovered on the ground. Researchers were able to pinpoint where to search based on videos from amateur astronomers, security cameras, and images from the FRIPON camera network that was designed exactly for this purpose. This meteor occurred nearly 10 years to the day after the more destructive Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia.
January 23, 2023
A new study of samples brought back from the Ryugu asteroid by the JAXA mission Hayabusa 2 helped to characterize and map different types of carbonate minerals within the samples. A near-infrared hyperspectral microscope developed by IAS has been analyzing the entire collection of samples. Hundreds of carbonate-rich zones were detected, including small carbonate-rich grains and carbonate-rich inclusions within larger grains, that formed within the first millions of years of evolution of our Solar System.