June 30, 2017

Toulouse Space Centre hosts CNES Board of Directors meeting

For its 350th session, CNES’s Board of Directors met at the agency’s Toulouse Space Centre (CST) to see the most recent advances in France’s space programme. Among the items on the agenda, special attention was given to disruptive technologies and development of new applications.

After the meeting of its 350th session, devoted to examining the agency’s budget, CNES’s Board of Directors visited the main facilities at the Toulouse Space Centre (CST), starting with the French Instruments Mars Operations Centre (FIMOC) from where CNES engineers and scientists and research laboratories attached to the national scientific research centre CNRS working on the Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL) operate the ChemCam and SAM instruments on the Curiosity rover. The Board members were then shown the flight model of the SEIS seismometer designed jointly with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that is set to launch on the InSight mission on 5 May 2018.

The tour of the CST then moved on to the PEPS Sentinel Product Exploitation Platform that provides easy and free access to data from the Sentinel satellites. Operating within the Copernicus network, these satellites are tasked with imaging and mapping our planet and collecting vast amounts of data to offer new insights into Earth’s environment and the impacts of human activities.

The Board then went behind the scenes at the PASO orbital systems architecture department, the unit that selects and prepares CNES’s future projects, notably those pursued jointly with NASA and ESA, and works on the architecture of systems, satellites and ground infrastructures.

The delegation then visited the nanosatellite room, where it was able to note the progress of the Janus student cubesat programme, before concluding its tour at the agency’s component testing laboratory, which offers both preventive and remedial support to satellite designers in selecting technologies.

Contacts :

Fabienne Lissak Head of Media                  Tél. 00 (33)1 44 76 78 37 fabienne.lissak@cnes.fr

Pascale Bresson Press officer                   Tél. 00 (33)1 44 76 75 39 pascale.bresson@cnes.fr

Raphaël Sart Press officer                         Tél. 00(33)1 44 76 74 51 raphael.sart@cnes.fr