The Heliosat-4 method developed by the MINES ParisTech and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), aims at estimating surface downwelling solar irradiance (SSI). It benefits from advanced products derived from recent Earth Observation missions, among which the cloud products are crucial for the assessment of SSI. The APOLLO cloud product provided by DLR includes abundant information about the cloud ...

Introduction: Continuous bombardment by aster-oidal and cometary debris over the last 4.5 Ga has churned the lunar surface into a fine-grained regolith. The violent nature of these impacts has largely destroyed the primordial lunar crust, reworking it into a variety of breccia and glass fragments that make up the majority of most Apollo soils. Nowhere is this more true than at the Apollo 16 sit...

This December marks 40 years since Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt of Apollo 17 left the lunar surface and returned safely to Earth. This anniversary has been given additional poignancy by the death earlier this year of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon with Apollo 11 in July 1969. The history of the Apollo project, and its geopolitical motivation within the context ...

Progressive telomere attrition or deficiency of the protective shelterin complex elicits a DNA damage response as a result of a cell's inability to distinguish dysfunctional telomeric ends from DNA double-strand breaks. SNMIB/Apollo is a shelterin-associated protein and a member of the SMN1/PSO2 nuclease family that localizes to telomeres through its interaction with TRF2. Here, we generated SN...

Human chromosome ends are protected by shelterin, an abundant six-subunit protein complex that binds specifically to the telomeric-repeat sequences, regulates telomere length, and ensures that chromosome ends do not elicit a DNA-damage response (reviewed in). Using mass spectrometry of proteins associated with the shelterin component Rap1, we identified an SMN1/PSO2 nuclease family member that ...

The recessive genetic disorder Fanconi anemia (FA) is clinically characterized by congenital defects, bone marrow failure and an increased incidence of cancer. Cells derived from FA patients exhibit hypersensitivity to DNA interstrand crosslink (ICL)-inducing agents. We have earlier reported a similar cellular phenotype for human cells depleted of hSNM1B/Apollo (siRNA). In fact, hSNM1B/Apollo h...