Thales Alenia Space, the joint company between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), a major player in the satellite, space exploration and orbital infrastructure market, and ONERA (Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales), the French national aerospace research center, have signed an agreement to cooperate on space activities.

For 25 years ONERA has been working on the issue of aerial robotics! Its experience provides it with expertise in most of the important scientific topics related to drones. It benefits from multi-disciplinary simulation capabilities and significant experimental resources. From 10 to 12 October, it will participate in the UAV SHOW, the first European professional drone show, which will be opened by ONERA's President Bruno Sainjon in person.

The end of the summer heralds, at ONERA, the arrival of a new director of aeronautical programmes, Philippe Beaumier, following the retirement of his predecessor, Hervé Consigny, at the end of July 2018.

A joint team from the French aerospace research center ONERA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) performed the ground vibration testing (GVT) of the new Airbus Beluga XL large transport aircraft.

Since you do not change a winning team, the satellites of NASA's Grace mission, launched on Tuesday 22 May 2018, will again be equipped with electrostatic accelerometers from ONERA. For the first mission, launched in 2002, ONERA had already developed and supplied the accelerometers: they have since run without a hitch for 15 years.

This issue of the international scientific journal edited by Onera is entitled "Design and Validation of Aerospace Control Systems: New Methods & Tools with Illustrations". Ten papers describe different very concrete aerospace applications.

Luc Vignaud, ONERA's radar research engineer, received the Individual Scientific Achievement Award for his contribution to NATO on September 20th in Berlin, in recognition of his 16 years of achievements on the SET panel - Sensors and Electronics Technology.

The Sphere instrument, installed on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, has for the first time obtained a shot of an exoplanet using direct detection methods. Its ONERA adaptive optics system, at the core of the instrument, is one of the keys to this success.

The 17th ONERA-DLR symposium took place in Aussois, near Modane, from June 7 to June 9, 2017. 35 participants from ONERA and the DLR gathered to discuss the subject of numerical flow simulation (CFD) and the related validation experiments.