page_title: Jacques Blamont
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques Blamont / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Vega mission. NSSDC NASA PD image
context_page_description: Jacques Émile Blamont was a French astrophysicist, author and the founder scientific and technical director of National Centre for Space Studies, known to have contributed to the development of Veronique, the first rocket launched by France in 1957. He was an elected fellow of the French Academy of Technologies and a professor emeritus of the Pierre and Marie Curie University.
  Blamont was a recipient of several national honours such as Commander of the Legion of Honour, the third highest French civilian honour, Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit, the second highest French civilian honour, Commander of the Academic Palms, Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit, the highest French civilian honour, President's Silver Medal, Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples and Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
  Blamont died on 13 April 2020 in Châtillon, Hauts-de-Seine, aged 93.
context_section_description: Blamont was one of the pioneers of French space programme and his efforts were reported in the establishment of CNES, the French Space Agency, in 1962. He was known to have contributed to the launch of the first French rocket, Véronique, in 1957. He was one of the founders of Service d’aéronomie du CNRS, (Aeronomy Service of Centre national de la recherche scientifique) and was its director from 1958 to 1985. He participated, as a member of the steering groups, in several global space missions such as the Voyager and Pioneer-Venus of NASA and Vega mission of the Soviet Union to Venus and Halley's Comet and acted as the chief investigator of the Phobos program of the USSR. He assisted Vikram Sarabhai in the establishment of the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) which later grew to become the present day Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and played a part in providing the payload for the first two Indian rocket launches in 1963 and 1964.
  Blamont was credited with the discovery of turbopause in 1959, the interstellar wind in 1970, the hydrogen envelope of comets in 1971 and the polar noctilucent clouds in 1973. He was known to have made the measurement of the temperature of the neutral atmosphere from 100 to 500 km, the dynamic parameters of the mesopause region, and Einstein's general relativity redshift on the Sun for the first time. He was the head of the group which introduced scientific ballooning and Lidar technology for atmospheric probing in Europe. The image compression device developed by Blamont is in use with various space agencies for planetary missions around the Moon, Mars and Titan. He also contributed to the establishment of a launch range, in Kourou, French Guyana.
  Blamont, besides writing several articles on science, authored four books, viz. Vénus dévoilée, Voyage autour d'une planète (Venus Unveiled – 1987), Le Chiffre et le Songe, Histoire politique de la découverte (The Digit and the – 1993), Le Lion et le Moucheron, Histoire des Marranes de Toulouse (The Lion and the Midge – 2000) and Introduction au Siècle des Menaces (Introduction to the Age of Menaces – 2004). He also mentored 80 research scholars in their doctoral research.
caption: Vega mission
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