Edito

Principal Investigator, since 2024.

PACIS is a microphone developed at ISAE-SUPAERO for the ExoMars descent module of the European Space Agency. It will record the acoustic environment of the entry, descent and landing phases, then listen to the Martian atmosphere at the surface during the lifetime of the platform : wind, turbulence and pressure fluctuations close to the ground. It builds directly on the experience of the SuperCam microphone.

Read more in La Dépêche (2025)

• Farside Seismic Suite — Co-Investigator, since 2020. A NASA payload that will bring seismometers derived from InSight to the far side of the Moon, to probe its interior from a region never explored on the ground.
• SPSS – Artemis III — Co-Investigator, since 2024. With JPL-Caltech, IPGP and CNES, we are preparing a seismometer to be deployed on the Moon by the astronauts of the Artemis III mission.

• StratOwl - Strateole-2 — Principal Investigator / Science Team member, since 2018 (AID funding). Instruments flown on long-duration stratospheric balloons to measure pressure waves and infrasound in the atmosphere.
• Balloon seismology — With Caltech and JPL, we showed that earthquakes can be detected from balloons through the infrasound they generate (NASA JPL Group Award, 2018).
• Venus — On Venus, the surface is too hostile for long-lived seismometers, but a balloon floating in the clouds could "hear" venusquakes. I took part in the Keck Institute for Space Studies workshop and study on Venus seismology (2014–2016) and in the VCGM mission proposal. Our long-term goal is to propose, with JPL, a balloon mission to Venus to better understand its history.

I am a member of the Science Definition Team of the ESA MEDaL-1 Mars lander, in the Atmosphere sub-group, where I work on the dynamics of the Martian planetary boundary layer (wind, turbulence) .

• PIONEERS (EU H2020, 2019–2024) — technical lead : optical rotational seismometers for planetary exploration.
• NEOMAPP (EU H2020, since 2020) — collaborator : instruments and modelling for proximity operations around small bodies.
• PSTAR (NASA, since 2017) — collaborator : R&T studies for planetary instrumentation.

Co-Investigator, SEIS Project Scientist. I was first project manager and systems engineer for the SEIS seismometer, then Co-Investigator in charge of the overall performance of the instrument, and I took part in its deployment and operations on Mars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAorZFLVH8M

Led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) deployed a geophysical station on the surface of Mars in November 2018 to study the structure and composition of its interior. Until the end of the mission in December 2022, it measured the seismic activity, heat flow and rotation of the planet. SEIS recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes, giving us the first direct views of the Martian crust, mantle and core.

A true technological challenge

The SEIS seismometer was developed in France by a technical and scientific team from CNES, the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (CNRS/Université Paris Cité), ISAE-SUPAERO and the company SODERN. Several European and American laboratories (ETH Zurich, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Imperial College London and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) contributed to this development, along with the Toulouse-based company EREMS. Other CNRS laboratories and French universities took part in the data analysis (LPG Nantes, IRAP Toulouse).

My contribution was recognised by three NASA JPL Group Awards in 2020 (InSight proposal team, deployment of the seismometer, InSight operations).

Collaborator, responsible for the microphone. This sensor is the result of a collaboration between ISAE-SUPAERO, responsible for the development and delivery of the microphone and for its scientific exploitation, and CNES, which oversees its project management. In February 2021, it recorded the first sounds ever captured on the surface of another planet.

The microphone is part of SuperCam, an enhanced version of the ChemCam instrument that has been operating on the Curiosity rover since 2012. Located on the rover’s mast to benefit from its pointing capabilities, it pursues several original objectives :

• studying the sound of laser impacts on Martian rocks to better understand their mechanical properties ;
• improving our knowledge of atmospheric phenomena at the surface : wind turbulence, dust devils, and interactions between the wind and the rover itself ;
• understanding the acoustic signature of the rover’s activities : robotic arm and mast, driving on Martian terrain, pumps, etc.

Its recordings also revealed that sound propagates at two different speeds on Mars, depending on its pitch.

Listen to the first sounds of Mars

Principal Investigator. With my colleagues of the DEOS department and our students, we designed and built EntrySat, the first CubeSat of ISAE-SUPAERO, launched in 2019 from the International Space Station to study the atmospheric re-entry of space debris.