Sylvain Lodiot shoots for the stars (and comets!)

What engineer hasn’t dreamed of breaking the career mold with an exceptional job? ENSPG (a founding school of Phelma) alumnus Sylvain Lodiot is living the dream, piloting the Rosetta space probe from the European Space Operations Center. But the job is a surprisingly complex one, involving 1,000 to 1,500 remote control commands per day. Each command takes dozens of minutes to travel the millions of kilometers that separate the probe from Earth.
Rosetta’s Philae lander hasn’t been heard from since last summer. But the probe’s mission continues, thanks to twelve other on-board instruments gathering information about the Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet. Towards the end of 2015 the scientifi c results of the mission should off er new insights into the ancient comet and shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Rosetta’s mission will end in 2016, twelve years after its launch. 

Contact: alexis.sableaux@phelma.grenoble-inp.fr

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