Astronaut Thomas Pesquet on March 25, 2017 during a spacewalk.

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Handout / EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY / AFP

  • At the spatial level, the first event to tick in the 2021 calendar is the arrival on Mars, on February 18, of the Perseverance rover, the starting point of a mission which aims to bring back to Earth samples of Martian rocks.

    France is participating in it.

  • 2021 will also see the return of Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station, for a new six-month mission.

    Departure planned for spring.

  • Finally, Jean-Yves Le Gall is impatiently awaiting the launch of the James Webb Telescope, which is to take over from Hubble and "will revolutionize space astronomy", predicts the president of the Cnes.

    Launch planned for October.

The end of 2020 was marked by a bad note for the Center national d'études spatiales (Cnes), the French space agency, with the failed launch, on the night of November 16 to 17, of Taranis.

The 100% made in France satellite, which was supposed to unravel the mystery of storms, was lost eight minutes after its launch from Kourou.

Place now in 2021, which promises to be rich in the space exploration component for France.

This Tuesday, during his greetings to the press, Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the Cnes, swept away the main expected meetings.

The March 2020 landing

February 18, at 9:36 pm… We will not wait long for the first strong point ticked by Jean-Yves Le Gall.

It is on this date and at this precise time that the Perseverance rover will begin its landing on the red planet.

NASA launched this new Mars ground exploration mission, entitled Mars 2020, six months earlier from Cape Canaveral [Florida].

Once at its destination, Perseverance's main mission will be to collect rock samples.

He will package them in sealed tubes, which he will then deposit on the way.

Another rover, slated to launch around 2026, will complete the job by collecting these tubes and placing them in a small rocket to be sent into orbit around Mars, then picked up by a satellite before being brought back to Earth. .

An end point that is not expected before 2031 and which could allow us to take a big step forward on a crucial question: was there life on Mars?

However, the whole issue of this mission could be condensed into a very short period of time.

Jean-Yves Le Gall thus speaks of the “seven minutes of terror” that the landing of Perseverance on Mars will last.

And its success is all the more crucial for the CNES since France is involved in several ways in this NASA mission.

Particularly in the design of the Supercam, one of the rover's seven scientific instruments.

Its very main.

Thomas Pesquet's return aboard the ISS

This is the second significant event pointed out by Jean-Yves Le Gall.

The 196 days spent aboard the International Space Station (ISS), from November 2016 to June 2017, did not satisfy the French astronaut.

Thomas Pesquet leaves for a new stay of about six months in space.

Liftoff is slated for this spring, this time from Cape Canaveral aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

This will be the second operational mission of the American spacecraft since the beginning of the partnership between NASA and the space company of Elon Musk.

Thomas Pasquet will once again take Cnes experiments developed at Cadmos (Center for the development of microgravity activities and space operations) in Toulouse.

Fourteen French scientific experiments will be carried out on board the ISS during this new mission.

“We also got the French astronaut to have extended prerogatives on board the station,” says Jean-Yves Le Gall.

Astronaut "rookie" for his first mission, he should be entrusted, this time, the supervision of scientific experiments.

»A rise in rank which places him ideally to obtain a ticket on the Artemis III mission.

Developed by NASA, it plans to bring man back to the Moon in 2024.

Thomas Pesquet could thus become the first European astronaut to set foot on the surface of our natural satellite.

He does not hide it, it is his dream: “Even if it takes a few years of delay, before 2030, we will have astronauts on the Moon in partnership with the European Space Agency in particular, he explained in an interview. at

20 Minutes

, in June 2019. Which means that there is a significant chance that Europeans will go to the Moon before the end of the 2030s and that still leaves me plenty of time to be part of this adventure there.

"

The James Webb Telescope, the highlight of the show?

In any case, this is how Jean-Yves Le Gall presents the third highly anticipated event in 2021. Fruit of an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), The James Webb Telescope is to be launched on October 21 by the Ariane 5 rocket, the European launcher, from Kourou.

What already puts a lot of pressure on the shoulders of Europeans, this new large space telescope worth 10 billion dollars, recalls the president of Cnes.

James Webb Telescope is to succeed the Hubble telescope, launched in 1990. It will be placed in orbit around the sun, around the point of Lagrange L2, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth on the side opposite the sun.

There, it will deploy its structure of 18 mirrors and its 20-meter-long sun visor.

Its size and superior capabilities to Hubble - its primary mirror is three times more sensitive than its predecessor - should enable astronomers around the world to study the planets of the Solar System and other planetary systems at an unmatched level of detail.

It will also help to determine what elements these planets are made of and, in this way, to estimate whether they present conditions conducive to life or not.

"The James Webb will revolutionize space astronomy as Hubble did in its time", already announces Jean-Yves Le Gall.

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