The Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP), formerly the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements (CESR), is a French laboratory of space astrophysics. It is located in

Toulouse Toulouse (, ; ; ) is a city in southern France, the Prefectures in France, prefecture of the Haute-Garonne department and of the Occitania (administrative region), Occitania region. The city is on the banks of the Garonne, River Garonne, from ...

. The center's main areas of investigation are: space plasmas, planetology, the high energy universe, and the cold universe. The center is jointly operated by

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 Toulouse's

Paul Sabatier University Paul Sabatier University (''Université Paul Sabatier'' , UPS, also known as Toulouse III) was a French university, in the Academy of Toulouse. It was one of the several successor universities of the University of Toulouse, established in 1229, m ...

, and was opened on 1 January 2011.

Projects

The

ChemCam Chemistry and Camera complex (ChemCam) is a suite of remote sensing instruments on Mars for the Curiosity (rover), ''Curiosity'' rover. As the name implies, ChemCam is actually two different instruments combined as one: a laser-induced breakdown ...

instrument on the ''Curiosity rover'' (

Mars Science Laboratory Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic spacecraft, robotic space probe mission to Mars launched by NASA on November 26, 2011, which successfully landed ''Curiosity (rover), Curiosity'', a Mars rover, in Gale (crater), Gale Crater on Augus ...

) was developed by CESR in conjunction with the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...

. It landed on the planet Mars in August 2012. The

SuperCam SuperCam is a suite of remote-sensing instruments for the Mars 2020 '' Perseverance'' rover mission that performs remote analyses of rocks and soils with a camera, two lasers and four spectrometers to seek organic compounds that could hold biosig ...

instrument on the ''Perseverance rover'' (

Mars 2020 Mars 2020 is a NASA mission that includes the rover ''Perseverance (rover), Perseverance'', the now-retired small robotic helicopter ''Ingenuity (helicopter), Ingenuity'', and associated delivery systems, as part of the Mars Exploration Progra ...

) was developed by IRAP in conjunction with the

. It landed on the planet Mars in February 2021.

References

External links

Official website
CNES French National Centre for Scientific Research Space science organizations 2011 establishments in France {{space-stub

Projects

See also

References

External links