This year at BIRA-IASB, we developed a new scientifically robust method to connect everyone through the New Year's wishes and Season's Greetings. For in the face of adversity, all we need is a little ingenuity and perseverance !

Stay safe, and enjoy the holidays!

Watch our New Year's video through this link

On November 28 of this year, BIRA-IASB scientist Alexis Merlaud arrived at the Belgian Princess Elisabeth polar station in Antarctica. His mission: to install two of our instruments to perform local ground measurements of aerosols in the atmosphere for the CLIMB project of the RMI (Royal Meteorological Institute).

RoadMap (for “ROle and impAct of Dust and clouds in the Martian AtmosPhere”), a brand new Horizon 2020 project, has just kicked off. Three years long an enthusiastic team of scientists and engineers from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Spain will work together to unravel some of the remaining Martian mysteries.

Sunday, 22th of November 2020 is Science Day in Flanders, a dazzling day full of discovering and experimenting fun via www.dagvandewetenschap.be.

The International Space Station was assembled in orbit, and today marks the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the first module of the ISS “Zarya” (meaning “dawn” in Russian) into space (November 20, 1998). A few weeks later, the second module “Unity” was launched and the two modules were coupled together, marking the first stage in the assembly of this permanent station, a cooperation between nations to propel humanity further into an era of space travel and space exploration for humans.

Cluster is one of the few space missions that is older than 22% of the Belgian population! Celebrating its 20th birthday this year, it has been gathering data about the Earth’s magnetosphere ever since. This continuous monitoring is of particular interest to researchers, as it allows for the study of long-term processes in the Earth’s magnetosphere, and how these processes depend on the Sun’s variability.