ROSETTA space mission, launched on March 2004, for the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P / C-G) was composed of an orbiter and Philae lander. The payload contained multiple instruments performing the teledetection and in situe measurements. The probe was accompanying the comet on its journey around the sun on the orbits close to the nucleus on the distance from tens to hundreds kilometers. The scientific objective of the mission is the study the cometary material, the surface and the internal structure of the comet and their evolution on the their journey around the sun.
The main scientific questions are:
How have formed and evolved comets? What are the physical propreties, structure of surface and interior of comets? What is the composition of the ice grains, molecules, organic? Have they played a role in the evolution of the planets?
On 12 November 2014 Philae lander, after some twists and turns, landed on the surface of the comet. This was a spectacular success and the first cometary landing in the history of the exploration of the solar system.
In our presentation we will describe the payloads of the probe and of Philae. We present and discuss some scientific results by ROSETTA and also by Philae.
We describe more specifically CONSERT bistatic radar, which the primary scientific goal was to investigate the deep interior of the nucleus of the comet. The radar had operated between the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander and through radio tomographic mapping between the lander and the main spacecraft, obtained important scientific results about the internal structure and composition of the comet 67/P C-G.
The Origins Space Telescope is one of the four flagship missions currently under study for the 2020 US decadal survey. OST will cover the full infrared wavelength domain, from 6.5 to about 500 microns. The science goals and associated measurement requirements for OST are being established by a
community-based Science and Technology Definition Team (STDT). The STDT is supported by a NASA
Center Study Office based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with partners at several other
NASA Centers and industry teams.
I will present the first mission concept, a cooled 9m telescope equipped with five instruments enabling sensitive imaging, spectroscopy and polarimetry to answer compelling questions in astrophysics such as the origin of black holes and galaxies, the origins of elements, the trail of water from the cold ISM to
disks and planets, etc.
This talk will present the OST study and describe the french participation supported by CNES.
The Juno mission offers a unique opportunity to study Jupiter, from its inner structure to its magnetospheric environment. Juno-UVS is a UV spectrograph with a bandpass of 70<λ<205 nm, designed to characterize Jupiter’s UV emissions, which are produced when the Jovian magnetospheric electrons and ions precipitate and collide Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. One of the main feature of UVS is its scan mirror, which allows targeting specific UV features that are located +/- 30˚ perpendicular to the Juno spin plane. Juno provides a unique vantage point in Jupiter’s system to perform observations otherwise not possible from Earth. In this seminar, I will present Juno’s main scientific objectives and present results regarding the magnetospheric science obtained from the Jupiter orbital insertion (4th July 2016) up to Perijove 7 (11th July 2017).
SOFIA, short for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy,
is a 2.7m telescope flying on a Boeing 747SP at altitudes of 12-14km,
to detect and study mid- and far-infrared radiation that is blocked
by water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere and cannot reach the
ground. It is the successor to the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (1974-1995)
and currently the only access to and platform for astronomical observations
in the far-infrared (30-300 microns), except for balloon-borne telescopes.
Although a bilateral project (80:20)
between USA (NASA/USRA) and Germany (DLR/DSI), it is open for
proposals from the world-wide astronomical community at large.
It addresses many science questions that ESA’s successful but
now extinct Herschel Observatory has left unanswered and
offers observational opportunities similar to and beyond Herschel.
SOFIA also has many synergies with ALMA and APEX, as well as the IRAM
submm and radio telescopes.
In my presentation, I will describe a glimpse of SOFIA science
highlights and discoveries in its first few years of operation,
both in astrochemistry (light molecules) and in astrophysics
(dynamics of star formation). I will also touch upon the science
prospects of new SOFIA instrumentation, including a far-infrared
camera for polarimetry.
SOFIA normally flies out of California, but once a year also
deploys to the Southern Hemisphere (usually to Christchurch,
New Zealand), benefitting from the excellent wintertime
stratospheric conditions to study the rich southern skies.
Hans Zinnecker (Deutsches SOFIA Institut, Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany; retired)
Clusters of galaxies are the largest (~ Mpc sizes) and the most massive (~1014-15 Msol) structures in the cosmic web. They enclose large quantities of hot baryonic gas emitting copious amounts X-ray photons, which allow to trace massive matter haloes out to large redshifts. For this reason, X-ray galaxy clusters are long-standing probes of the growth of large-scale structure: studies of their distribution in space and in mass are driven by their unique capability in constraining cosmological models and the nature of dark energy. I will select and describe important observational and modeling challenges related to cosmology with X-ray galaxy clusters, by presenting results and forecasts based on ongoing large-area surveys: X-CLASS, the XMM-XXL and SDSS-IV/SPIDERS. In particular, I will demonstrate the ability of a self-consistent approach combining X-rays, optical and weak-lensing measurements to study cosmological parameters and physical scaling relations of X-ray clusters.
Single stellar populations, being born from the same molecular cloud at virtually the same time, are often assumed to share the same chemical composition. While this assumption is quite accurate for the initial chemical composition of the stars, once stellar evolution sets in it does not hold any longer. Processes such as atomic diffusion, the first dredge-up and extra-mixing result in variations in the stellar surface chemical composition depending on their evolutionary stage. This has broad implications: e.g., atomic diffusion effects put a constraint to the precision achievable by chemical tagging methods, while the post-dredge-up [C/N] ratio can be used for the age-dating of field stars. Open clusters are ideal examples of single stellar populations and are therefore extremely useful for the study of stellar evolution. I will present an investigation of stellar evolutionary effects in the well-known old open cluster M67 based on high-resolution spectra from APOGEE and the Gaia-ESO Survey, including a comparison with the predictions of stellar evolutionary models.
With the wealth of ancillary data available in large domains of the
spectrum (GALEX, HST, CFHT, Spitzer, Herschel, etc), panchromatic studies of
galaxies are thus one of the keys to understand how galaxies evolved since their
formation. After describing the assets of spectral energy distributions (SED)
analysis and explaining how we can model them, I will discuss the star formation history of the
bulk of galaxies and show with a concrete case how we can identify and characterize galaxies
than underwent a rapid star formation quenching with a sample of well-known local galaxies, the Herschel
Reference Survey. This sample contains galaxies from the field but also from the
dense environment of the Virgo cluster. From this pilot study, I will go to
higher redshifts in order to blindly identify sources that have just been
quenched using CANDELS/GOODS-South data and try to identify possible causes for
this.