REYNAUD , Serge

The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are subject to an unexplained acceleration which has a constant value of (8.74±1.33)10-10 ms-2 and seems to be directed toward the Sun. In 2006, five french laboratories formed the Groupe Anomalie Pioneer (GAP) in order to analyse a set of the Doppler data received from the Pioneer spacecraft. To perform this...

After performing highly sensitive acceleration measurements during two years of drag-free flight around the Earth, MICROSCOPE provided the best constraint on the weak equivalence principle (WEP) to date. Beside being a technological challenge, this experiment required a specialised data analysis pipeline to look for a potential small signal...

Odyssey 2 will be proposed in December 2010 for the next call of M3 missions for Cosmic Vision 2015-2025. This mission, under a Phase 0 study performed by CNES, will aim at Neptune and Triton. Two sets of objectives will be pursued. The first one is to perform a set of gravitation experiments at the Solar System scale. Experimental tests of...

The MICROSCOPE mission aimed to test the weak equivalence principle (WEP) to a precision of 10$^{−15}$. The WEP states that two bodies fall at the same rate on a gravitational field independently of their mass or composition. In MICROSCOPE, two masses of different compositions (titanium and platinum alloys) are placed on a quasi-circular...