339th session of CNES Board of Directors meets and adopts 2015 budget

Meeting for its 339th session on Friday 5 December, CNES’s Board of Directors adopted the agency’s budget for 2015 and its programmatic plan for 2015-2020, reviewed the findings of the latest meeting of its Science Programmes Committee (CPS) and approved a number of decisions, notably concerning the MERLIN and SWOT missions.

CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall kicked off the meeting by reporting to the Board on the two great successes recently accomplished within weeks of one another by spacefaring Europe, with CNES playing a key role: first, the historic success of the Rosetta mission, culminating on 12 November with the comet landing of Philae; and second, the go-ahead to develop Ariane 6 decided on 2 December at the ESA Ministerial Council meeting in Luxembourg, where CNES convinced member states to sign up to the vision and configuration it was proposing for the launcher.

The Board then authorized the draft of the contract to be signed with Thales Alenia Space for the joint CNES/NASA SWOT mission to measure surface water levels in lakes, rivers, flood zones and oceans, and the signature with Airbus Defence and Space of a contract to develop the Methane Remote Sensing Lidar Mission (MERLIN) satellite.

The Board then heard the report from Jean-Loup Puget, the chair of the agency’s Science Programmes Committee (CPS), on the recommendations that emerged from the space science seminar in La Rochelle, and on the strategy advocated by the CPS concerning the future direction of Science and Observation programmes.

Finally, the Board adopted the agency’s 2015 budget and its programmatic plan for 2015-2020. At the end of the meeting, Jean-Yves Le Gall commented: “That CNES’s budget for 2015 should remain stable is particularly satisfying given our current tight fiscal constraints. CNES’s expertise is thus reaffirmed and it will have the means necessary to meet the major challenges that lie ahead and pursue its ambitious ongoing missions with the same degree of success.”