AstroLR

Hello to all, this post is the first in a series of “reviews” of some things I have found, read, or heard on the web and through my scientific monitoring. If I found it interesting, you might as well, so I'll do like every good scientist does: share and enjoy! Rosetta The big news of this week is of course the successful awakening of ESA's comet chaser : Rosetta (fr) / (en) ! I was following intensively the event on Twitter (#WakeUpRosetta), and it was already tense. But if you want to watch the full media briefings and videos on that day to feel even more the tension, ESA has set a playlist on Youtube for you. The LATMOS is quite involved in Rosetta with 7 instruments: On the orbiter: ALICE : UV spectro-imager CONSERT (Comet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radiowave Transmission) : Hyperfrequency souding of the comet's nucleus MIDAS : Microscope to study the dusts OSIRIS : Visible camera ROSINA : Neutral and ionized gases spectrometer...

Welcome here on my blog! I am Loïc, a PhD student currently working in LATMOS in Guyancourt, France. LATMOS stands for L aboratoire AT mosphères, M ilieux et O bservations S patiales, which deals with atmospheres and surfaces of our home planet and the others. This implies that there are a lot of people studying the Earth climate, using satellites and other spatial instruments. I am on the other part: the one that studies other planets. My team ( IMPEC ) covers Mars, Venus, Titan, asteroïds and comets. I myself study Venus. Less popular than Mars or Titan, Venus is still pretty cool. It is hell! Surface pressure is about 90 times the Earth's atmospheric pressure, temperature can reach 400°C on the surface, and the atmosphere is mostly made of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The rest is sulfur, reacting with the (few) water that's left to form clouds of sulfuric acid. It is so much like hell that the spacecraft we (by “we” read “the Soviet Union”) sent lasted about an h...