LIRA
Laboratory for Instrumentation and Research in Astrophysics

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) is the first sample-return mission from the Phobos satellite. It also includes an exploration of the Martian system. The mission’s primary objective is to decipher the origin of Martian moons, which will provide important information on planet formation and the conditions for the emergence of water on Earth-like planets.

The MIRS (MMX InfraRed Spectrometer) instrument, developed under the leadership of LESIA (now LIRA), is an imaging spectrometer that will characterize the composition of the Martian system and help select candidate sites for sample collection.

The GRAVITY instrument, installed on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI/ESO), has produced spectacular and transformative results on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, the active nuclei of other galaxies, proto-planetary disks around young stars and exoplanets. GRAVITY+ aims to modernise both VLTI and GRAVITY to make them ≈ 100 times more sensitive, while increasing sky coverage by a factor of ≈ 100, and contrast in the vicinity of bright objects by a factor of ≈ 10. These gains will benefit all the VLTI’s current and future instruments for the next 20 years, and will perpetuate it as a unique infrastructure in the world.