Research news
Find here the latest scientific news from the Institute's groups.
Hundreds of international researchers who are members of the Deep Carbon Observatory, including Bénédicte Ménez and Emmanuelle Gérard of IPGP, published on December 10 on the occasion of AGU 2018 the sum of their work, estimating that deep life would represent a mass of 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon, several hundred times more than that of the 7 billion human beings.
Engineers have set up a complete test bench to reconstruct the Martian environment on Earth on the Elysium plain. A life-size replica of InSight, called ForeSight, equipped with the entire deployment system dominates an area in which mineral material simulating Martian regolith has been dumped.
The island of Dominica has in the past experienced ignimbritic sanding eruptions involving significant volumes of magma, among the richest in water ever described and stored at great depth in a transcript system as far as Moho.
An international team compiled all the data from the VIMS imaging spectrometer to create a global surface map of Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, in the infrared, showing the geological diversity of the lands. A synthetic video illustrates its main features.
The location of the InSight lander on the surface of the Red Planet has just been accurately determined using the HiRise super camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite. With the parts that the probe left behind when it began its descent: the thermal shield and the parachute.
The SEIS seismometer's short-period (SP) sensors, as well as the ultra-sensitive pressure sensor from InSight's APSS weather station, have probably just returned the first sounds ever picked up on the Red Planet, capturing the noise that the wind makes when it vibrates InSight's flexible solar panels, moving around the landing gear.
The logos of space laboratories, including that of Institut de physique du globe de Paris, which built the SEIS seismometer and developed its on-board software, are beginning to become visible on the flat cable connecting the seismometer to its control electronics.
After years of research, months of development, thousands of hours of work, a 485 million kilometre journey, and ‘7 minutes of terror’, the InSight probe, the result of international collaboration and carrying the SEIS seismometer designed at IPGP, landed on Mars on Monday 26 November 2018.
By combining barometry and composition of fluid inclusions trapped in lava crystals and recent enclaves of the Piton de la Fournaise, a new study has provided new insights into the evolution of CO2 from the mantel source to its degassing in the atmosphere.
In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers from Institut de physique du globe de Paris, Université Paris Diderot, CNRS and Synchrotron SOLEIL provide a first-rate argument for the latter hypothesis, and in particular for the hydrothermal theory of the origin of life, even pushing back its possible emergence in depth, well beyond the hydrothermal sources of the ocean floor.
On Saturday 5 May at 4:05 a.m. Pacific time, the Atlas V rocket took off from Vandenberg, California, sending the InSight probe to Mars. This launch, the first on the west coast of the United States for a planetary mission, was followed by scientific teams, as well as numerous media outlets and enthusiasts from around the world.
Two days before the launch of the InSight mission, NASA organised a major press conference at the Vandenberg military base. Scientists and officials from NASA, JPL, CNES, IPGP and other partners presented the various aspects of the mission and answered questions from the many media outlets present.