Blamont continued at CNRS for a year more as a research fellow[9] and joined the Aeronomy Service of the institution in 1957 where he became the deputy director in 1958.[9] In 1961, he was promoted as the director, a post he held till 1985.[3][6][9] He worked in many capacities during his stay with CNES, as a Scientific and Technical Director (1962–1972), as Top Scientific Advisor (1972–1982) and as an advisor to the President of CNES[10] from 1982.[3][6][12] During this period, he served the Pierre and Marie Curie University as a professor without chair from 1957 to 1961, as a full professor from 1962 to 1996 and as a professor emeritus from there on.[4][6][9][12][13] He also worked as a research director at École Militaire (Joint Defence College).[9]
Blamont was one of the pioneers of French space programme[6][9] and his efforts were reported in the establishment of CNES, the French Space Agency, in 1962.[4][10] He was known to have contributed to the launch of the first French rocket, Véronique,[10] in 1957.[4] 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.[6] He participated, as a member of the steering groups,[10] 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.[4][6][12] He assisted Vikram Sarabhai[6] 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)[21] and played a part in providing the payload for the first two Indian rocket launches in 1963 and 1964.[6]
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.[6][10] 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 relativityredshift on the Sun for the first time.[6][9][10] He was the head of the group which introduced scientific ballooning and Lidar technology for atmospheric probing in Europe.[6] The image compression device developed by Blamont[10] is in use with various space agencies for planetary missions around the Moon, Mars and Titan.[6] He also contributed to the establishment of a launch range, in Kourou, French Guiana.[9]
Blamont, besides writing several articles on science, authored four books,[9][12][22] viz. Vénus dévoilée, Voyage autour d'une planète (Venus Unveiled – 1987),[23]Le Chiffre et le Songe, Histoire politique de la découverte (The Digit and the – 1993),[10][24]Le Lion et le Moucheron, Histoire des Marranes de Toulouse (The Lion and the Midge – 2000)[25] and Introduction au Siècle des Menaces (Introduction to the Age of Menaces – 2004).[26][27] He also mentored 80 research scholars in their doctoral research.[9]
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