VIDEO. Toulouse: at the Cité de l’Espace as on Mars
A Martian terrain, with replicas (real size and mobile) of the Perseverance and Zhurong rovers, is the brand new equipment that has just inaugurated the Cité de l’Espace. Designed in partnership with CNES, it will be open to the public from April 5.
It is the replica of the Perseverance rover, in person, who came to bring the pair of scissors intended to cut the inaugural ribbon of the Martian terrain, this Wednesday at the Cité de l’espace, in Toulouse.
Designed in shades of red, orange, ochre, this 800 m2 Martian terrain is shaped like a crater. It is bordered on one side by bleachers where the public can sit; on the other, rocks eroded by the wind. More than two years were necessary for its design “in order to offer an immersive animation, in real conditions, to understand the current exploration of Mars”, announces Jean Baptiste Desbois, the general manager of the Cité de l’Espace.
Supported by CNES, this Martian terrain was designed and developed in collaboration with scientific experts from the French space agency and the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP), in order to reproduce the most realistic Martian landscape possible. . “We are lucky to be able to knock on the desk of these specialists to benefit from their expertise on Mars, based on the eye of the robots they pilot from Toulouse. Here, we are as close as possible to what the rovers survey and see at the same time on the Red Planet”, specifies Aude Lesty, exhibition-heritage manager at the Cité de l’Espace, who followed this project from A to Z.
218 visitors in the crater
This new place of scientific mediation focusing on Mars, the most explored planet in the solar system, will be accessible to the public from Tuesday April 5th. No less than 218 visitors could be accommodated simultaneously in this amphitheater. Demonstrations of about thirty minutes animated by the scientific animators will be on the menu every day.
“We are going to offer visitors a real immersion on Mars, as if they were there. Currently, rovers are exploring the Red Planet. As we can’t go there, we’re going to play everything again here, with identical replicas of the Perseverance and Zhurong robots, in a Martian terrain that looks like two drops of water to Mars”, promises Christophe Chaffardon, education director , science and culture at the Cité de l’Espace.
At the end of their visit, the public will be unbeatable on the specificities of the two rovers such as the energy with which they operate (solar panels or nuclear battery), their mobility but also how they are piloted from Earth and what the instruments are used for. with which they are equipped, such as the SuperCam laser camera, designed and manufactured by CNES and the Toulouse research laboratory IRAP.
The first and only Martian flying vehicle, Ingenuity will also be there. Thanks to a life-size model, visitors could discover this small helicopter designed exclusively to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere during the Mars 2020 mission (Perseverance).
Popularize and provoke emotion
For his part, the Toulouse astrophysicist, Sylvestre Maurice, who has piloted every day, “with a hundred people”, for 10 years, at CNES, the real Perseverance rover, equipped with the Super Cam, on the real Red Planet, welcomes this popularization about Mars, at the Cité de l’espace. “We gave them the background and the trouble to work on the form. It’s not easy to create a Martian terrain. Here they dared and succeeded in taking up a sacred challenge. Space needs that of places of scientific culture like this which popularizes, provokes emotion and envy”. And puts Mars within everyone’s reach.
And all the more so since we haven’t finished talking about the Red Planet since the rock samples taken at the moment, by the robotic arms of the rovers, and packaged in tubes, should eventually reach Earth. So far, 10 samples out of the 40 planned have been completed. But how to recover them? “By 2028, we have the project to send a rocket to Mars which will bring them back. In 2031, we should have 500 grams of Martian rocks. This is enough to trace the entire history of Mars and find out if there was life in the past, ”says Sylvestre Maurice.