CNES

GAIPAN is an organization for the study and information group on unidentified aerospace phenomena.

It is a CNES organization and its mission is not to prove that UFOs are extraterrestrial.

Its mission is to collect reports, analyze them, investigate them where appropriate, classify them, archive the evidence, and inform the public.

That distinction matters because France has done something relatively unusual.

The organization doesn't have to choose between those two possibilities, it can record both.

To understand how France reached this point, we have to go back to 1977.

This was the year CNES created GPAN.

CNES therefore dates its formal study of PAN to 1977.

MMX represents a unified international collaboration.

JAXA is the primary operator, but they are working closely with France's CNES, Germany's DLR, NASA from the United States, and the European Space Agency.

A massive coalition.

They have scores of universities and tech companies backing them, but they face determined competition from other global powers who are running their own independent architectures.

They don't have to redo the, the road that we traveled in over for now 70 years, okay? And fortunate to see this day when things have become open.

I've been asked to rejoin the scientific board of the, the French Space Committee, the CNES, which is the space agency in France.

So we'll be spending more time in Europe working with my, my colleagues there.

Nice.

This would give InSight the best chance at successfully deploying its sensitive instruments, and then listen, unmoving, silently for years.

InSight was carrying the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS, a seismometer primarily built by the French space agency CNES as part of an international collaboration.

The seismometer worked by using electrodes to measure the displacement of the moving parts of its pendulum, making for an astonishingly sensitive instrument.

At the time it was deployed, SEIS was the most sensitive seismometer ever put on another planet.