Mission

The Jean-Marie Mariotti Center coordinates the efforts of French Partner Laboratories with interferometric expertise to offer all the potential users of interferometric facilities the best operational environment. The mission of JMMC is threefold and consists in:

  • develop, produce, document and maintain the software necessary for the exploitation and the follow-up of new interferometric equipments, especially the VLTI,
  • stimulate and coordinate the academic formation of non specialists,
  • participate to the prospective around new interferometric instruments.

The main activity of JMMC, besides prospective and training, is software oriented system analysis and software development. We cover the whole range of services before and after acquiring the interferometric data, as pictured below, showing the full observational data lifetime circle.

The other rubrics describing how we are working are written in French: the JMMC is a formal structure appointed by the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU). It involves engineers, researchers at partial time from different french institutes, and depends on national and local ressources. The human ressources, regarding the researchers, follow rules of a national competitive examination. This one is considering in particular the tasks proposed by the applicants inside a Service among a set of "National Actions of Observation" (ANO). The JMMC has two such Services: MOIO and SUV, respectively for the TOOLS and the USER SUPPORT.

The JMMC’s tools, like Aspro, SearchCal, GetStar, AMBERdrs, pndrs (PIONIERdrs) , OIfits Explorer, OIval... have benefited from exchanges with specialists of the interferometric community, in addition to those involved in the JMMC groups. So,

many thanks to our colleagues:

Daniel Bonneau, Pierre Cruzalèbes, Denis Mourard (LAGRANGE/OCA), Xavier Delfosse, François Hénault, Fabien Malbet (IPAG/OSUG), Olivier Absil ((Liège University), Pierre Kervella (LESIA/OPM), Jacques Kluska (KU Louvain), Antoine Mérand (ESO).

and Special thoughts for Olivier Chesneau (1972-2014)

Olivier has crossed the JMMC sky like a meteor. Recruited at CNAP in 2004, he joined the JMMC in the "Calibrators" group of which he became the P.I. in 2010. He notably led the ESO-JMMC collaboration on the supply of calibrators for VLTI and set up the "BadCal" Catalog, a work for the community that added to all his other works (see e.g. this page).
A main belt asteroid, discovered by E.F. Helin and R.S. Dunbar at the Palomar Observatory on July 27, 1987, was renamed (6065) Chesneau in 2014 in honor of Olivier.