Bepi Colombo : Europe and Japan set out to conquer Mercury
Mercury is a planet that has so far been relatively little studied. Also, the European, ESA, and Japanese space agencies, JAXA, have worked together to meet this challenge and set […]
PEPS
Planets, Environments and Space Plasmas
Saturn: Cassini discovers a new radiation belt
About one year ago, a spectacular dive into Saturn’s upper atmosphere put an end to the Cassini mission, a unique project that studied the Saturn system for 13 years. During […]
Parker Solar Probe: French research takes off towards the Sun
Parker Solar Probe will soon become the closest spacecraft to the Sun, just over 6 million kilometres from the surface of our star. This NASA probe will include an instrument […]
Workshop between amateur astronomers and planetary scientists – planets in full glamour!
Under Horizon 2020, the Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure includes an entirely new Virtual Access Service, “Planetary Space Weather Services” (PSWS) that extend the concepts of space weather and space situational […]
BepiColombo : last instrument checkings and tests for MIO – the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter – before launch !
On June 21-27 the IRAP BepiColombo Team has flown to Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in order to perform the last checkings of the two Mercury Electron Analyzers (MEA) built by […]
Delivery and testing of the first set of FM MCP detectors for the JENI instrument
On June 7, 2018, the JUICE (Jupiter Icy moon Explorer, European Space Agency) project team at IRAP went to the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA […]
Exploring planetary plasma environments from your laptop
A new database of plasma simulations, combined with observational data and powerful visualisation tools, is providing planetary scientists with an unprecedented way to explore some of the Solar System’s most […]
NASA MMS satellites discover new magnetic reconnection process associated with plasma turbulence
In a recent article published in the journal Nature, scientists including a researcher from IRAP (Université Paul Sabatier de Toulouse & CNRS) discovered a new type of magnetic process, closely […]
2,000 sols of exploration of the Gale crater by the Curiosity robot on Mars
After nearly 6 years of exploration of the Gale Crater, NASA’s Curiosity robot passes the 2000-sols mark (1 sol = 1 Martian day = 24 hr 40 min) on the […]