Francois Forget (born in 1967) is a French astrophysicist, specializing in the exploration of the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...

and planetary environments. He is a research director at the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

and a member of the

French Academy of Sciences The French Academy of Sciences (, ) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific method, scientific research. It was at the forefron ...

Biography

After graduating from

ENSTA Paris The ENSTA Paris, officially École nationale supérieure de techniques avancées (; ), is a French graduate school of engineering (''école d'ingénieurs''). Founded in 1741, it is the oldest ''grande école'' in France. It is located in Palaisea ...

in 1991 and subsequently defending his thesis on the study of the planet Mars in 1996, François Forget became a CNRS research fellow in 1998. He created the "planetology" team of the Laboratory of Dynamic Meteorology (LMD) in 2003 and then headed the "Solar System" pole of the Pierre-Simon-Laplace Institute from 2009 to 2017. He worked at

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

between 2004 and 2005 and became CNRS Research Director at the LMD in 2010.

Works

François Forget is involved in many space missions such as

Mars Express ''Mars Express'' is a space exploration mission by the European Space Agency, European Space Agency (ESA) exploring the planet Mars and its moons since 2003, and the first planetary mission attempted by ESA. ''Mars Express'' consisted of two ...

(ESA),

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO or ExoMars Orbiter) is a collaborative project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Roscosmos agency that sent an atmospheric research orbiter and the ''Schiaparelli'' demonstration lande ...

(ESA), ''

New Horizons ''New Horizons'' is an Interplanetary spaceflight, interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institut ...

'' (NASA),

InSight Insight is the understanding of a specific causality, cause and effect within a particular context. The term insight can have several related meanings: *a piece of information *the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of se ...

(NASA) or Rover

ExoMars ExoMars (Exobiology on Mars) is an astrobiology programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The goals of ExoMars are to search for signs of past life on Mars, investigate how the Martian water and geochemical environment varies, investigate ...

(ESA). He studies the climate and atmospheres on the telluric planets of the solar system (Mars, Venus, Pluto, Titan, Triton) and on

exoplanet An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was in 1992 around a pulsar, and the first detection around a main-sequence star was in 1995. A different planet, first det ...

s. To do this, it has developed digital models designed to simulate environments on these planets in order to analyze space observations, prepare robotic missions, study the habitability of exoplanets and better understand the Earth.

Distinctions

* Elected member of the

in December 2017 * In 2014, François Forget received the David Bates Medal from the EGU for his work on modelling the climate of the planets of the solar and extrasolar system and "for having set up one of the first qualitative frameworks allowing

comparative planetology Comparative planetary science or comparative planetology is a branch of space science and planetary science in which different natural processes and systems are studied by their effects and phenomena on and between multiple bodies. The planetary pr ...

" * CNRS Bronze medal in 2001

Bibliography

* La Planète Mars : histoire d'un autre monde, Belin, 2006, 160 p. () * Solar System and Planets, Ellipse, 2009, 249 p. ()

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Forget, Francois French astrophysicists Members of the French Academy of Sciences 1967 births Research directors of the French National Centre for Scientific Research 21st-century French astronomers Living people French planetary scientists