LAINEY , Valéry

The Gaia mission will operate over five years, nominally starting from 2011. Several tens of accurate astrometric and photometric measurements of each of the Solar System bodies will be available. In this work we focus on the specific case of the moons of Mars, whose positions will be known with an uncertainty better than 0.05 mas, never...

Context. The 98° obliquity of Uranus is commonly attributed to giant impacts that occurred at the end of the planetary formation. This picture, however, is not devoid of weaknesses. Aims. On a billion-year timescale, the tidal migration of the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn has been shown to strongly affect their spin-axis dynamics. We aim to...

The Institut de mecanique celeste et de calcul des ephemerides (IMCCE, Paris Observatory) is willing to provide information on Solar System objects to the Astronomical Virtual Observatory. The first step is the interconnection of IMCCE ephemerides servers with the Vizier and Aladin tools of the Centre de donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg...

The origin of Saturn's inner mid-sized moons (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea) and Saturn's rings is debated. Charnoz et al. [Charnoz, S., Salmon J., Crida A., 2010. Nature 465, 752-754] introduced the idea that the smallest inner moons could form from the spreading of the rings' edge while Salmon et al. [Salmon, J., Charnoz, S.,...

The ESA astrometric mission Gaia has been launched in December 2013. It is currently in its commissioning phase, with the first scientific data expected to be downloaded in June 2014. Gaia has the capability to observe, in addition to about one billion of stars, a large number of solar system objects (SSO) [1]. The satellite and telescope will...

The Gaia ESA space mission will provide astrometric observations of a large number of celestial bodies, with unprecedented accuracy, and in an homogenous reference frame (to become the optical ICRF). The Gaia satellite is monitoring regularly the whole celestial sphere, with one complete scan in about 6month, down to approximately magnitude...

After its successful launch in December 2013, and commissioning period, ESA's astrometric space mission Gaia has now started its scientific operations. In addition to the 3D census of our Milky Way with high precision parallax, proper motion, and other parameters derived for a billion of stars, Gaia will also provide a scientific harvest for...

Using astrometric observations spanning more than a century and including a large set of Cassini data, we determine Saturn's tidal parameters through their current effects on the orbits of the eight main and four coorbital Moons. We have used the latter to make the first determination of Saturn's Love number from observations, k2=0.390 ± 0.024,...