5 December 2024
Event
20 July 2020 Celebrating Mars
Published on16.07.2020
This summer join us in celebrating Mars. In honour of the launch of the 2020 Mars mission this summer, la Cité de l’espace has organized a special day on July 20th 100% focused on Mars. In addition to the many events planned, several experts will be on hand to share their knowledge about the exploration of planet Mars, including Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at IRAP (which is responsible with CNES for the French part of SuperCam, the laser camera for the planned Perseverance rover mission), Jean-François Clervoy, a French astronaut, Agnès Cousin, a geologist and astronomer at IRAP, and David Mimoun, a professor and researcher at ISAE . A somewhat unusual special guest, on loan from CNES till the end of the summer, promises to be an attention-grabber: the life-size model of the Perseverance rover with its six wheels and small Ingenuity helicopter. Sent to the Red Planet for the Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance is carrying a piece of a Mars meteorite which belongs to la Cité de l’espace. It will be used to calibrate SuperCam.
In July 2020, three missions are planned to Mars: Hope (United Arab Emirates), Mars 2020 (NASA) and Tianwen-I (China).
