February 14, 2022

CNES AND PORTUGAL SPACE UNVEIL SPACE PROJECTS FOR FRANCE-PORTUGAL SEASON

CNES and its Portuguese counterpart Portugal Space are teaming up to take part in the programme of cultural events scheduled for the France-Portugal Season running simultaneously this year in both countries from 12 February to 31 October. Four joint projects on the programme will be aiming to take space culture to young people and the wider public.

Thursday 3 March, near the Capitole in Toulouse, in the presence of French and Portuguese dignitaries, the two agencies will be presenting joint space activities they are working on under the season’s banner.

This spring, residents and visitors to Guimaraes in Portugal (8 March to 10 May) and Bordeaux in France (4 to 29 April) will be able to admire an exhibition showing the French and Portuguese coasts from a satellite’s eye view, with pictures acquired by the French Pleiades and Portuguese Geosat satellites. This exhibition will also seek to raise public awareness of necessary efforts to safeguard our oceans and preserve their environment and biodiversity. In addition, these very-high-resolution Earth-observation satellites are vital tools for informing political, economic, scientific, environmental and social decisions.

Every year for its youth education programme, CNES organizes a Student Parabola flight campaign to give French teams of students the chance to do experiments in microgravity conditions aboard the Airbus ZERO-G aircraft operated by Novespace. For this year’s campaign,

CNES and Portugal Space have brought together universities and top engineering schools in both countries to come up with joint projects in material science, fluid physics, biology and biomedical science, all areas of research that lend themselves well to microgravity experiments. The LOTUS project is a team effort between students from the ISAE/Supaero aerospace engineering school in Toulouse, France and the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal. This experiment will test the deployment of origami structures in microgravity. The two other experiments selected are from France: CAPI by the ENSAM engineering school will look at ways of forcing fluid to move in a specific direction in weightless conditions, while AMIS from the IPSA aerospace engineering school will be building a robot capable of moving in weightlessness to assist astronauts in their tasks.

The teams got together during a virtual workshop on 16 December 2021 with CNES and Novespace to prepare for the next phase of the experiments before the actual parabolic flight campaign planned in Mérignac, France from 3 to 7 October.
Created by CNES, Spatiobus is a roving bus that conducts outreach operations focused on space applications and technologies and is also equipped to receive telemetry from rockets and balloons designed and launched by youngsters. From 7 to 25 March, it will be going outside France for the first time to travel the length of Portugal. The tour will be coordinated by Ciencia Viva, the Portuguese Science and Engineering outreach organization, which will be inviting schoolchildren to its centres to take part in a range of activities led by CNES’s partner Planète Sciences around Earth observation, deep-space exploration and rocket building.

EuRoc and C'Space are two science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach programmes conceived respectively by Portugal Space and CNES to encourage youngsters to pursue science and engineering studies and promote space-related careers. Cross-communication for these two events aims to raise the profile of curricula in Portugal and France and spawn interactions between the two countries’ academic communities. EuRoC pits teams of students against each other to build and launch experimental rockets on the Ponte de Sor campus and will be running from 11 to 18 October. C’Space is the yearly summer space event where students get the chance to launch rockets, balloons and cansats built during the year for CNES’s educational projects. This year’s C’Space will be taking place in Tarbes from 16 to 23 July.

CONTACTS
Olivia Baumann    Press Officer    Tel. +33 (0)1 44 76 76 77    olivia.baumann@cnes.fr
Pascale Bresson    Press Officer    Tel: +33 (0)1 44 76 75 39    pascale.bresson@cnes.fr
Raphaël Sart    Head of Media    Tel: +33 (0)1 44 76 74 51    raphael.sart@cnes.fr
Hermínia Saraiva    Communications Officer    Tel. +351 969 053 533    herminia.saraiva@ptspace.pt
Nuno Rafael Gomes    Communications Department     Tel: +351 910 290 913    nuno.gomes@ptspace.pt