Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory have captured the X-ray glow (shown here in purple) emitted by the hot gas that pervades the galaxy cluster XLSSC006.

The cluster is home to a few hundreds of galaxies, large amounts of diffuse, X-ray bright gas, and even larger amounts of dark matter, with a total mass equivalent to some 500 trillion solar masses. Because of its distance from us, we are seeing this galaxy cluster as it was when the Universe was only about nine billion years old.

The galaxies that belong to the cluster are concentrated towards the centre, with two dominant members. Since galaxy clusters normally have only one major galaxy at their core, this suggests that XLSSC006 is undergoing a merger event.

Pictured in this view, where the X-ray data are combined with a three-colour composite of optical and near-infrared data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, are a multitude of other galaxies. Some are closer to us than the cluster – like the spiral galaxy towards the top right – and some are farther away. The image also shows a handful of foreground stars belonging to our Milky Way galaxy, which stand out with their diffraction spikes (a common artefact of astronomical images), while the small purple dots sprinkled across the frame are point sources of X-rays, many of them beyond the Milky Way.

The X-ray data were obtained as part of the XXL Survey, XMM-Newton’s largest observational programme to date, with follow-up observations performed by a number of other observatories around the world and in space. The latest XXL Survey release contains data for 365 galaxy clusters, tracing their large-scale distribution across cosmic history. These observations are helping astronomers refine our understanding of the Universe’s structure and evolution, and will serve as a reference for ESA’s future missions Euclid and Athena.

More about the XXL Survey: Tracing the Universe: X-ray survey supports standard cosmological model.

Credits: ESA/XMM-Newton (X-rays); CFHT-LS (optical); XXL Survey

This wider view of the Uranian system with Webb’s NIRCam instrument features the planet Uranus as well as six of its 27 known moons (most of which are too small and faint to be seen in this short exposure). A handful of background objects, including many galaxies, are also seen.

Learn more here

[Image description: The planet Uranus is on a black background just left of centre. Just below the planet at the 7 o’clock position is a faint blue point labeled Puck. Brighter blue points at 8 o’clock, 5 o’clock, and 3 o’clock are labeled Ariel, Miranda, and Umbriel, respectively. Two additional blue points at 7 o’clock and 5 o’clock are labeled Titania and Oberon]

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI)

The many colourful curves and folds of the Flinders Ranges – the largest mountain range in South Australia – are featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

The Flinders mountains are a classic example of a folded mountain range, which are formed when two or more of Earth’s tectonic plates collide – folding and pushing layers of land into mountain ranges.

The formation of the Flinders Range began to form around 800 million years ago, when an ancient sea deposited sediments into the Adelaide Geosyncline basin. Millions of years later, the sediments were folded into mountains, which have since eroded. However, the folded rocks remained and were uplifted to create the landscape as we see it today.

The Flinders Ranges stretches for over 400 km across the Australian outback – from Port Pirie to Lake Callabonna. The first humans to inhabit the Flinders Ranges were the Adnyamathanha people, who have inhabited the range for tens of thousands of years.

The area pictured here shows the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park in the Northern Flinders Ranges. The rugged park’s main attractions include deep gorges, chasms and an impressive wilderness. Numerous creeks appear like veins across the entire image, while the straight, white lines visible in the bottom right are dirt roads.

Slightly west of the image pictured here lies the Ediacara Hills, where some of the oldest fossil evidence of animal life was discovered.

The flora of the Flinders Ranges are largely species who have adapted to a semi-arid environment, including sugar gum tree, cypress-pine and mallee. Since the eradication of dingoes in the area, the number of red kangaroos, western grey kangaroos and wallaroos in the mountains has increased.

This image, also featured on the Earth from Space video programme

, was captured on 31 December 2019 by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission – a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus programme. The image was processed by selecting spectral bands that can be used for classifying geological features.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, began forming around 12 billion years ago. Since then, it has been growing in both mass and size through a sequence of mergers with other galaxies.

Perhaps most exciting is that this process has not quite finished, and by using data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, astronomers can see it taking place. This in turn allows to reconstruct the history of our galaxy, revealing the ‘family tree’ of smaller galaxies that has helped make the Milky Way what it is today.

The latest work on this subject comes from Khyati Malhan, a Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues. Together, they have analysed data based on Gaia’s early third data release (EDR3) looking for the remains of smaller galaxies merging with our own. These can be found in the so-called halo of the Milky Way, which surrounds the disc of younger stars and central bulge of older stars that comprise the more luminous parts of the Milky Way.

When a foreign galaxy falls into our own, great gravitational forces known as tidal forces pull it apart. If this process goes slowly, the stars from the merging galaxy will form a vast stellar stream that can be easily distinguished in the halo. If the process goes quickly, the merging galaxy’s stars will be more scattered throughout the halo and no clear signature will be visible.

But the merging galaxy may contain more than just stars. It could also be surrounded by a population of globular star cluster and small satellite galaxies. So, the team looked for these in the Gaia data.

In total they studied 170 globular clusters, 41 stellar streams and 46 satellites of the Milky Way. Plotting them according to their energy and momentum revealed that 25 percent of these objects fall into six distinct groups. Each group is a merger taking place with the Milky Way. There was also a possible seventh merger in the data.

Five had been previously identified on surveys of stars. They are known as Sagittarius, Cetus, Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus, LMS-1/Wukong, and Arjuna/Sequoia/I’itoi. But the sixth was a newly identified merger event. The team called it Pontus, meaning the sea. In Greek mythology, Pontus is the name of one of the first children of Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth.

Based upon the way Pontus has been pulled apart by the Milky Way, Khyati and colleagues estimate that it probably fell into the Milky Way some eight to ten billion years ago. Four of the other five merger events likely also took place around this time as well. But the sixth event, Sagittarius, is more recent. It might have fallen into the Milky Way sometime in the last five to six billion years. As a result, the Milky Way has not yet been able to completely disrupt it.

Piece by piece, astronomers are fitting together the merger history of the Galaxy, and Gaia data is proving invaluable.

On 13 June 2022, the Gaia mission will issue its data release 3, which will provide even more detailed information about the Milky Way’s past, present, and future.

Image description:

This image shows the Milky Way as seen by Gaia. The squares represent the location of globular clusters, the triangles the location of satellite galaxies, and the small dots are stellar streams. The dots and squares in purple are objects brought into the Milky Way by the Pontus merging galaxy.

This research by Khyati Malhan was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

ESA’s Navigation Laboratory has a new recruit: this drone can carry different types of satellite navigation receivers to collect data for follow-on analysis.

The NavLab, based at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, is focused on the testing, analysis and characterisation of navigation systems for both ESA and external customers.

With drones representing a rapidly-expanding satnav user base, this is a timely addition to the NavLab’s suite of platforms for the testing of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technologies and techniques – also including static, mobile and pedestrian platforms and a pair of test vans.

Along with receivers and antennas, the drone can also host radio-frequency spectrum samplers and support equipment, allowing the assessment of performance in specific dynamics and environments related to aeronautical GNSS applications. See it in action here.

To find out more about working with ESA facilities, check our new website on the duties and resources of ESA’s Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality.

Credits: ESA-Remedia

This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, shows the Amazon River meandering through one of the most vital ecosystems in the world – the Amazon rainforest in South America.

This image has been processed in a way that shows water bodies, such as the Amazon River, in blue. The Amazon river begins its journey in the Andes and makes its way east through six South American countries before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast coast of Brazil. The river has a length of around 6400 km – the equivalent of the distance from New York City to Rome.

The Amazon is considered the widest river in the world with a width of between 1.6 and 10 km, but expands during the wet season to around 50 km. With more than 1000 tributaries, the Amazon River is the largest drainage system in the world in terms of the volume of its flow and the area of its basin. As a consequence of its ever-changing flow, older riverbeds can be seen as thin lines around the main river at the top of the image.

One of its tributaries, the Javari River, or Yavari River, is visible as a thinner blue line weaving through the tropical rainforest. The river flows for 870 km, forming the border between Brazil and Peru, before joining the Amazon River.

In the image, cities and built-up areas are visible in cyan, for example the cities of Tabatinga and Leticia with two airports are easily identifiable in the far-right. The yellow and orange colours in the image show the surrounding Amazon forest.

The colours of this week’s image come from the combination of two polarisations from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission, which have been converted into a single image.

As radar images provide data in a different way than a normal optical camera, the images are usually black and white when they are received. By using a technology that aligns the radar beams sent and received by the instrument in one orientation – either vertically or horizontally – the resulting data can be processed in a way that produces coloured images such as the one featured here. This technique allows for a better distinction of features on the ground.

This image, acquired on 3 March 2019, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Resembling a wizard’s staff set aglow, NGC 1032 cleaves the quiet darkness of space in two in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

NGC 1032 is located about a hundred million light years away in the constellation Cetus (The Sea Monster). Although beautiful, this image perhaps does not do justice to the galaxy’s true aesthetic appeal: NGC 1032 is actually a spectacular spiral galaxy, but from Earth, the galaxy’s vast disc of gas, dust and stars is seen nearly edge-on.

A handful of other galaxies can be seen lurking in the background, scattered around the narrow stripe of NGC 1032. Many are oriented face-on or at tilted angles, showing off their glamorous spiral arms and bright cores. Such orientations provide a wealth of detail about the arms and their nuclei, but fully understanding a galaxy’s three-dimensional structure also requires an edge-on view. This gives astronomers an overall idea of how stars are distributed throughout the galaxy and allows them to measure the “height” of the disc and the bright star-studded core.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, CC BY 4.0

This image shows a new type of star that has never been seen before in X-ray light. This strange star formed after two white dwarfs – remnants of stars like our Sun – collided and merged. But instead of destroying each other in the event, the white dwarfs formed a new object that shines bright in X-ray light.

A team of astronomers led by Lidia Oskinova of the University of Potsdam, Germany, used ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope to study the object that was originally discovered in 2019. Back then, astronomers already reported that the object has very high wind speeds and is too bright, and therefore too massive, to be an ordinary white dwarf. They suggested that the object is a new type of star that survived the merger of two white dwarfs.

Based on new information from XMM-Newton, Lidia and her team now suggest that what we see in the image is a new type of X-ray source powered by the merger of two white dwarfs. The remnant of the clash – the nebula – is also visible in this image, and is mostly made out of the element neon (shown in green). The star is very unstable and will likely collapse into a neutron star within 10 000 years.

Credits: ESA/XMM-Newton, L. Oskinova/Univ. Potsdam, Germany

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals the intricate, detailed beauty of Jupiter’s clouds in this new image taken on 27 June 2019 by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, when the planet was 644 million kilometres from Earth. The image features the distinct bands of roiling clouds that are characteristic of Jupiter’s atmosphere and represents a

stretched-out map of the entire planet.

Researchers combined several Hubble exposures to create this flat map, which excludes the polar regions (above 80 degrees latitude). These observations of Jupiter form part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) programme.

Learn more.

Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley); CC BY 4.0

It's confirmed! ESA is building its fourth deep space antenna – much like the Cebreros dish pictured here – that will ensure upcoming missions like JUICE and the Hera mission have someone to talk to when they get to space.

'Deep Space Antenna 4' will be located at the New Norcia ground station in Western Australia, home of Europe’s first 35-metre antenna.

ESA’s ESTRACK network is currently made up of three deep space stations across the globe as well as a number of smaller dishes, and it is running at peak capacity. Following analysis of future mission needs, this fourth antenna will provide much-needed communication support to upcoming European and non-European deep-space missions.

Using the latest super-cool technology, the ‘antenna feed’ – through which data flows in from space – will be cryogenically cooled to just 10 degrees Kelvin (only 10 degrees above absolute zero, about -263 C). Doing this, incredibly, is expected to increase the amount of data returned by 40% at the high frequencies used for spacecraft command and control.

Such technology will also be used in the Cebreros station pictured here, and the Malagüe station, dramatically increasing the amount we can ‘hear’ from space.

Work should be finished on the station by the end of 2023, ready to begin operations by mid-2024 – just in time for the JUICE and HERA missions.

You now now find out, in real time, exactly what each ground station is up to using ESTRACKnow. Find out out exactly which spacecraft are communicating with which ground antennas at any moment, and check out the handy guide for more information!

Credits: ESA / J. Mai

Firefighters in Greece are battling numerous wildfires that have triggered a series of evacuations, as authorities brace for more extreme weather that has brought searing temperatures across southern Europe. This image shows the fires surrounding Athens on 19 July captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

A state of emergency was declared on the island of Rhodes, where firefighters have been trying to contain a major blaze that prompted authorities to evacuate thousands of residents and tourists.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

This walking and hopping robot is currently being tested in ESA’s Mars Yard.

SpaceBok is a quadruped robot designed by a Swiss student team from ETH Zurich and ZHAW Zurich, under the supervision of Professor Marco Hutter and PhD student Hendrik Kolvenbach, for future missions to the Moon or Mars.

“Legged robots can traverse unstructured terrain and could be used to explore areas of interest, such as craters, which rovers are unable to reach,” explains team member Patrick Barton. “As they are very versatile, they can change gait to adapt to different terrain.”

“In contrast to other legged robots, SpaceBok is primarily built for hopping,” adds team member Elias Hampp. “While this is not particularly useful on Earth, it could reach a height of four metres on the Moon. This would allow for a fast and efficient way of moving forward.”

“We are currently implementing and testing vision sensors, to increase SpringBok’s autonomy and robustness,” says team member Radek Zenkl.

ESA’s 8 x 8 m Mars Yard ‘sandbox’, filled with different sizes of sand, gravel, and rock, is part of the Planetary Robotics Laboratory at the Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

See video of the SpaceBok here.

Credits: ESA

Space Science image of the week:

These 210 images reflect Rosetta’s ever-changing view of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko between July 2014 and September 2016.

The sequence begins in the month leading up to Rosetta’s arrival on 6 August, when the comet was barely a few pixels in the field of view. Suddenly, the curious shape was revealed and Rosetta raced to image its surface, coming within 10 km, to find a suitable place for Philae to land just three months later.

Philae’s landing is featured with the ‘farewell’ images taken by both spacecraft of each other shortly after separation, and by Philae as it drew closer to the surface at its first touchdown point. An image taken at the final landing site is also shown.

The subsequent images, taken by Rosetta, reflect the varying distance from the comet as well as the comet’s rise and fall in activity as they orbited the Sun.

Before the comet reached its most active phase in August 2015, Rosetta was able to make some close flybys, including one in which the lighting geometry from the Sun was such that the spacecraft’s shadow could be seen on the surface.

Then, owing to the increase of dust in the local environment, Rosetta had to maintain a safer distance and carry out scientific observations from afar, but this also gave some impressive views of the comet’s global activity, including jets and outburst events.

Once the activity began to subside, Rosetta could come closer again and conduct science nearer to the nucleus, including capturing more high-resolution images of the surface, and looking out for changes after this active period.

Eventually, as the comet returned to the colder outer Solar System, so the available solar power to operate Rosetta fell. The mission concluded with Rosetta making its own dramatic descent to the surface on 30 September 2016. A selection of the final images taken are reflected in the last images shown in this montage.

See a version of this image as a movie .

Explore thousands of Rosetta images in our Archive Image Browser.

More about Rosetta and its science discoveries.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0; ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA; ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA; ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR

The Orion spacecraft with European Service Module (left), Earth (middle) and the Moon (right) are captured in this ‘family portrait’ by Orion’s solar array camera during the spacecraft’s closet approach to the lunar surface.

Six days into the 25-day Artemis I mission, the Orion spacecraft performed a key manoeuvre: just a little more than 130 km from the lunar surface, the main engine on the European Service Module – a repurposed Space Shuttle engine that is now on its 20th spaceflight – fired for just under 150 seconds to push the spacecraft and head towards a lunar orbit using the Moon’s gravity to reduce fuel consumption.

The manoeuvre, known as the Outbound Powered Flyby, was another success for the Artemis I mission, whose goal is to test the mission profile, the spacecraft, and the people operating it in preparation for flights with astronauts on future missions.

The European Service Module is powering Orion around the Moon and back, providing propulsion, temperature control, electricity as well as storage and delivery for essential supplies such as fuel, water and air.

Mission control for Orion is at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA, where European engineers are on hand at all times to offer in-depth expertise on the finer details of the service module. The mission evaluation room based at ESA’s technical heart in The Netherlands also has personnel round the clock in direct communication with their US and European colleagues in mission control in Houston.

“Operationally the spacecraft is performing perfectly and the international collaboration with this new spacecraft with new flight rules is great to see,” says ESA’s Programme Manager for the European Service Modules, Philippe Deloo, “The teams across both sides of the Atlantic are showing exemplary skills, knowledge and teamwork leading humankind forward to the Moon.”

Stunning new imagery of Earth from a human-rated spacecraft such as this image is also important to the mission, bringing the wonder of space exploration to the public some 50 years after the last Apollo mission.

This photo was taken by a Go-Pro fastened to the end of one of four 7 m-long solar array, and connects to the spacecraft over a wireless network. The solar arrays provide enough electricity to power two households on Earth.

Find the latest updates on Artemis I on the ESA Orion blog and on Twitter @esaspaceflight.

Credits: NASA

The Pine Island Glacier recently spawned an iceberg over 300 sq km that very quickly shattered into pieces. This almost cloud-free image, captured on 11 February by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, shows the freshly broken bergs in detail.

A recent animation using 57 radar images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission shows just how quickly the emerging cracks from the glacier grew – leading to this historic calving event.

Thanks to the combination of both optical and radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel satellite missions, growing cracks were spotted in the Pine Island Glacier last year, and since then, scientists have been keeping a close eye on how quick the cracks were growing.

The Pine Island Glacier, along with its neighbour Thwaites glacier, connect the centre of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet with the ocean, and together discharge significant quantities of ice into the ocean.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Reminiscent of an artist’s pallet, this striking false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission features Lake Abbe in northeast Ethiopia.

Visible as the large round dark area, Lake Abbe, also known as Lake Abhe, straddles the border of Ethiopia to the west and Djibouti to the east. The lake is 19 km wide and 17 km long and is extremely salty. It is dotted with clusters of steaming limestone chimneys and surrounded by large salt flats, visible in white, and rift volcanoes. The biggest volcano in the image is Mount Dama Ali, a dormant 25-km-wide shield volcano that rises on the northwest shore of the lake.

Lake Abbe and Lake Afambo, which is visible at the top of the image, are part of a chain of six connected salt lakes, fed by the Awash River – one of Ethiopia’s biggest rivers.

This image was acquired using Copernicus Sentinel-2’s near-infrared channel, which highlights vegetation in bright red, as shown in the top left along the Awash River. This type of band combination also helps to image algal blooms, which can be identified by the red stripes in the dark waters of Lake Abbe. The light blue colour on the west shore indicates sediment discharged into the lake.

Because of its dry, desert, almost lunar landscape and the steaming, sulphuric vents, Lake Abbe is considered one of the most inaccessible areas on Earth. Earth observation satellites are key in these cases as they are particularly relevant for monitoring remote regions such as this.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured this impressive, wide-angled view of Patagonia at the southern end of South America, as well as the Falkland Islands (Malvinas).

Covering an area of around 673 000 sq km, Patagonia is split by Argentina and Chile. The region comprises the southern section of the Andes Mountains, with lakes, fjords, rainforests and glaciers in the west and deserts and tablelands to the east.

The island archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, located at the southern tip of Patagonia (the southernmost tip of the image), is shared by Argentina and Chile, with the eastern part of the main island belonging to Argentina and the southern point of the archipelago, which forms Cape Horn, belonging to Chile. The Strait of Magellan, named after the discoverer, lies between Tierra del Fuego and mainland Argentina.

Part of the Alberto de Agostini National Park can be seen in the bottom of the image. The park features a highly irregular coastline, which is deeply indented by fjords. Deemed a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the park has several tidewater glaciers and comprises the Gordon, Cook and Londonderry islands.

The Falkland Islands can be seen in the far-right of the image. The islands lie in the South Atlantic Ocean, around 600 km east of Patagonia. The Falklands comprise two main islands, West Falkland and East Falkland, which are separated by the Falkland Sound – a channel that averages around 20 km in width.

The swirling green and blue coloured areas are densely concentrated phytoplankton blooms. These microscopic organisms thrive in the cool, nutrient-rich waters between the coast of southern Argentina and the Falkland Islands. Nutrients carried by rivers promote phytoplankton growth, which may explain the plankton hugging the South American coastline in the image, as well as dust carried from Patagonia offshore which is then diffused on the ocean surface by strong westerly winds.

In spring and summer, populations of algae in the South Atlantic often explode into enormous blooms – which float with the meandering ocean currents. Carrying a suite of cutting-edge instruments, Copernicus Sentinel-3 measures systematically Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere to monitor and understand large-scale global dynamics.

Sentinel-3 measures the temperature, colour and height of the sea surface as well as the thickness of sea ice, while over land maps land, provides indices of vegetation state and measures the height of rivers and lakes.

This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Just as people of the same age can vary greatly in appearance and shape, so do collections of stars or stellar aggregates. New observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest that chronological age alone does not tell the complete story when it comes to the evolution of star clusters.

Previous research on the formation and evolution of star clusters has suggested that these systems tend to be compact and dense when they form, before expanding with time to become clusters of both small and large sizes. New Hubble observations in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy have increased our understanding of how the size of star clusters in the LMC changes with time.

Learn more

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA; CC BY 4.0

Space may be the final frontier for human exploration but it is certainly not the only frontier. Remote areas on Earth, like Antarctica, continue to draw researchers and explorers for their otherworldly potential.

Pristine environments, limited resources, and near-complete isolation are just some of the attractions of Antarctica, often termed the White Desert. Numerous research stations dot the outer regions of the continent where scientists gather data on glaciology, seismology, climate change and the stars.

The French-Italian Concordia research station is one of three year-round stations and is located on Dome C, a plateau some 3200 m above sea level. Secluded from the world in inhospitable conditions, the crew stationed there tackle temperatures that can drop to –80°C in the winter, with a yearly average temperature of –50°C.

The air is extremely dry, so the crew suffer from continuously chapped lips and irritated eyes. The great open landscape alternates between months of night and months of daylight, and colours, smells and sounds are almost non-existent, adding to the sense of loneliness.

In other words, Concordia is perfect.

Here, researchers study the atmosphere, free from pollution, to gain insights into how the world’s population is changing Earth’s climate. Scientists conduct glaciology research by analysing the Antarctic plateau to reveal clues to our past as chemicals are trapped and frozen in the ice.

The thin atmosphere, clear skies and zero light-pollution around Concordia make it an enviable place for observing the Universe. The very southern location of Antarctica also makes it ideal for studying Earth’s magnetic field.

Delving deeper, Concordia is looking at the inside movements of Earth. A seismograph at Concordia measures movement and the research base is part of the international network of seismograph stations.

And then there is the human factor. Despite all the hardships of life in Antarctica, up to 16 people spend around a year at a time living in Concordia in the name of science. In addition to helping conduct other experiments and station maintenance, they are an experiment themselves. And ESA sends a medical doctor to Concordia to study the crew, like this year’s resident Dr Carmen Possnig, imaged above.

The elevation, isolation and sensory deprivation can wreak havoc on crewmembers’ biological clock, making it hard to get a good night’s sleep. Researchers track the effects of this on the human body and mind which adds to data being collected on astronauts on the International Space Station.

Insights are used to help people on Earth like shift workers, bedridden patients and those suffering from sleep disorders, and of course, astronauts serving in low Earth orbit.

Antarctic research at Concordia is helping humans adapt, mentally and physically, to a changing climate, a longer voyage in space, and eventually, life on another planet.

Read more about life at Concordia on the Chronicles from Concordia blog.

Credits: ESA/IPEV/PNRA-M. Buttu

This smattering of celestial sequins is a spiral galaxy named NGC 4455, located in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair). This might sound like an odd name for a constellation — and in fact it is somewhat unusual; it’s the only modern constellation to be named in honour of a real person from history: Queen Berenice II of Egypt.

The story of Queen Berenice II is an interesting one. A ruling queen of the ancient Greek city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya, and later a queen of Ptolemaic Egypt through her marriage to her cousin Ptolemy III Euergetes, Berenice became known for sacrificing locks of her hair as an offering to ensure her husband’s safe return from battle. Her husband did indeed return safely and her hair, which she had left in a Zephyrium temple, had disappeared — it had apparently been stolen and placed among the stars.

Should it be located in NGC 4455, it travelled a long way. The galaxy is about 45 million light-years away. This image was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, I. Karachentsev et al.; CC BY 4.0

Galaxies abound in this spectacular Hubble image; spiral arms swirl in all colours and orientations, and fuzzy ellipticals can be seen speckled across the frame as softly glowing smudges on the sky. Each visible speck of a galaxy is home to countless stars. A few stars closer to home shine brightly in the foreground, while a massive galaxy cluster nestles at the very centre of the image; an immense collection of maybe thousands of galaxies, all held together by the relentless force of gravity.

Galaxy clusters are some of the most interesting objects in the cosmos. They are the nodes of the cosmic web that permeates the entire Universe — to study them is to study the organisation of matter on the grandest of scales. Not only are galaxy clusters ideal subjects for the study of dark matter and dark energy, but they also allow the study of farther-flung galaxies. Their immense gravitational influence means they distort the spacetime around them, causing them to act like giant zoom lenses. The light of background galaxies is warped and magnified as it passes through the galaxy cluster, allowing astronomers insight into the distant — and therefore early — Universe.

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS, CC BY 4.0

This oblique perspective view of Medusae Fossae on Mars was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.

Read more

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Montage of images captured during the total solar eclispe on 2 July 2019, from ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, South America. The images show the progression of the eclipse as the Moon moves in front of the Sun from Earth's perspective and away again. The moment where the Moon is directly in front of the Sun (centre image) is known as totality.

Credits: ESA/CESAR/Wouter van Reeven

This is the first direct image of a star other than the Sun, made with the Hubble Space Telescope. Called Alpha Orionis, or Betelgeuse, it is a red supergiant star marking the shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter.

The Hubble image reveals a huge ultraviolet atmosphere with a mysterious hot spot on the stellar behemoth's surface. The enormous bright spot, which is many hundreds times the diameter of Sun, is at least 2, 000 Kelvin degrees hotter than the surface of the star.

New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the unexpected dimming of the supergiant star Betelgeuse was most likely caused by an immense amount of hot material ejected into space, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight coming from Betelgeuse’s surface.

Go to Hubble helps uncover the mystery of the dimming of Betelgeuse to learn more.

Credits: Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Ronald Gilliland (STScI), NASA and ESA; CC BY 4.0

Space Science image of the week:

This shot from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, measuring over 150 light-years across. It is known as a HII region, meaning it is rich in ionised hydrogen. Indeed, it contains many hot young stars that are emitting intense ultraviolet light, which causes nearby hydrogen gas to glow. Torrential stellar winds are also carving out ridges, arcs and filaments from the surrounding material.

At the heart of this cosmic cloud lies the Papillon Nebula, a butterfly-shaped region of nebulosity dominating the left of the scene. This compact nebula likely contains massive stars in the very early stages of formation. Its shaped earned it the name (papillon being French for butterfly) and was first resolved by Hubble in 1999.

N159 is located over 160 000 light-years away. It resides just south of the Tarantula Nebula, another massive star-forming complex within the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This image was first released as a Hubble picture of the week on 5 September 2016.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; CC BY 4.0

This oblique perspective view of part of the scarred and colourful landscape that makes up Aonia Terra, an upland region in the southern highlands of Mars, was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.

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Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Western US states have been battling close to 100 wildfires, blanketing the majority of the west coast in smoke. Captured on 10 September, this Copernicus Sentinel-3 image shows the extent of the smoke plume which, in some areas, has caused the sky to turn orange.

In this image, multiple fires can be seen in the states of California, Washington and Oregon – the areas hit hardest by the blazes – producing the thick plume of smoke which can be seen travelling westwards. Based on additional data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission, as of yesterday, the smoke was visible travelling 2000 km west of the active fires.

The cities of Portland, Eureka, Eugene, San Francisco and Sacramento are all blanked in smoke. In the top of the image, the cities of Vancouver and Seattle are visible.

Sentinel-3 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring programme. Each satellite’s instrument package includes an optical sensor to monitor changes in the colour of Earth’s surfaces. It can be used, for example, to monitor ocean biology and water quality.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

A prominence seen in the chromosphere during the total solar eclipse of 2 July.

Prominences are made of tangled magnetic field lines that keep dense concentrations of solar plasma suspended above the Sun’s surface. They are anchored to the Sun's visible surface and extend outwards through the chromosphere and out into the corona. The red hue of the chromosphere is only apparent during an eclipse.

The image was taken by the ESA-CESAR team observing the eclipse from ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, South America.

Credits: ESA/CESAR

In observations taken on 7 September 2021, researchers found that Neptune’s dark spot, which recently was found to have reversed course from moving toward the equator, is still visible in this image, along with a darkened northern hemisphere. There is also a notable dark, elongated circle encompassing Neptune’s south pole. The blue colour of both Neptune and Uranus is a result of the absorption of red light by the planets’ methane-rich atmospheres.

Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team; CC BY 4.0

As this image captured today, 11 February, by Copernicus Sentinel-3 shows, the Netherlands remains pretty much snow-covered thanks to days of sub-zero temperatures following the country’s first major snowstorm in a decade.

Storm Darcy hit the Netherlands in the evening of Saturday 6 February as it pushed its way through much of northern Europe. Strong winds and bitter cold, which initiated a ‘code red’ weather warning, brought the country to an almost standstill as most public transport was cancelled the following day – by which time most of the country was under around 10 cm of snow. The snowfall also caused disruption to parts of the UK and Germany.

Although the snow stopped falling a day or so later, temperatures have remained below freezing, reawakening the Dutch passion for ice-skating. The Netherlands is home to the century-old ‘Elfstedentocht’, a 200-kilometre race on natural ice through 11 towns and cities in the northern province of Friesland. It was last held in 1997, but the current Covid pandemic restrictions mean that this historic race, which can attract thousands of participants and hundreds of thousands of spectators, is not permitted this year.

Climate change is thought to be having an impact on the chances of conditions being right for an Elfstedentocht – the canal ice has to be at least 15 cm thick. According to the Dutch Meteorological Institute, KNMI, a century ago, there was a 20% chance every year of it being cold enough to organise the race, this has now decreased to an 8% chance.

Copernicus Sentinel-3 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring programme. Each satellite carries the same suite of four sensors. This image, showing snow cover in the Netherlands, Denmark, part of the UK and part of Germany, was captured by the mission’s ocean and land cover instrument.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

ESA’s Gaia data release 3 shows us the speed at which more than 30 million Milky Way stars move towards or away from us. This is called ‘radial velocity’ and it is providing the third velocity dimension in the Gaia map of our galaxy. Together with the proper motions of stars (movement across the sky), we can now see how the stars move over a large portion of the Milky Way.

This sky map shows the velocity field of the Milky Way for ~26 million stars. The colours show the radial velocities of stars along the line-of-sight. Blue shows the parts of the sky where the average motion of stars is towards us and red shows the regions where the average motion is away from us. The lines visible in the figure trace out the motion of stars projected on the sky (proper motion). These lines show how the direction of the speed of stars varies by galactic latitude and longitude. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are not visible as only stars with well defined distances were selected to make this image.

Read more about Gaia's data release 3 here.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Strait of Gibraltar is featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

The Strait of Gibraltar connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean and separates southernmost Spain from northernmost Africa. The channel is 58 km long and narrows to 13 km in width between Point Marroquí (Spain) and Point Cires (Morocco). Ferries and vessels can be seen travelling across the strait and crossing between the two continents.

This false-colour image, captured on 28 October 2020, was processed in a way that included the near-infrared channel. This type of band combination from Copernicus Sentinel-2 is most commonly used to assess plant density and health, as plants reflect near-infrared and green light, while absorbing red. Since they reflect more near-infrared than green, dense, plant-covered land appears in bright red.

Water bodies, such as the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, appear in dark blue or black while turbid waters, such as those visible along the Spanish coast in the top-left of the image, appear in cyan or light blue. This is most likely due to sediment-laden waters flowing from rivers into the sea. Inland water bodies, such as the Barbate Reservoir visible at the top of the image, can be spotted in various shades of azure owing to their turbidity.

Several prominent cities can be seen in the image in grey. These include Tangier, the port and principal city of northern Morocco which lies just 27 km from the southern tip of Spain. Tétouan lies along the Martil Valley and can be seen in the bottom-right of the image. Its medina is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site since 1997.

At the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula, the Bay of Gibraltar can be seen. The shoreline is densely populated and the shore is divided, from west to east, between the Spanish municipalities of Algeciras, Los Barrios, San Roque, La Línea de la Concepción and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.

Copernicus Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission. Each satellite carries a high-resolution camera that images Earth’s surface in 13 spectral bands. The mission is mostly used to track changes in the way land is being used and to monitor the health of vegetation.

This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

Credits:

contains modified Copernicus Sentinel missions (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

ESA’s Earth Explorer Aeolus satellite lifted off on a Vega rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on 22 August at 21:20 GMT (23:20 CEST). Using revolutionary laser technology, Aeolus will measure winds around the globe and play a key role in our quest to better understand the workings of our atmosphere. Importantly, this novel mission will also improve weather forecasting.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

This image shows the incredible detail at which the international Cassini spacecraft is observing Saturn’s rings of icy debris as part of its dedicated close ‘ring grazing’ orbits.

This image focuses on a region in Saturn’s B ring, which is seen in twice as much detail as ever before, revealing a wealth of rich structure.

Saturn’s rings are composed mainly of water ice and range from tiny dust-size specks to boulders tens of metres across. Some of the patterns seen in Cassini’s close images of the rings are generated by gravitational interactions with Saturn’s many moons, but many details remain unexplained.

Cassini is expected to return a library of new detailed images of the rings in the coming months, which will help planetary scientists learn more about the mysterious patterns.

The spacecraft’s ring-grazing orbits began last November, and will continue until late April, when the mission enters its ‘grand finale’ phase. During 22 finale orbits Cassini will repeatedly dive through the gap between the rings and Saturn before plunging into the planet’s atmosphere in mid-September to conclude its incredible 13-year odyssey in the Saturn system.

The image was taken in visible light with Cassini’s wide-angle camera on 18 December 2016, at a distance of about 51 000 km from the rings, and looks towards the unilluminated side of the rings. Image scale is about 360 m per pixel.

In order to preserve the finest details, this image has not been processed to remove the many small bright blemishes, which are created by cosmic rays and charged particle radiation near the planet.

The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency

The image was first featured in a release published on 30 January 2017.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Sitting 2400 m above sea level on the volcanic island of Tenerife, Spain, ESA’s Optical Ground Station keeps watch on the skies.

The 1-m telescope nestled within the dome on the left of this image, spends its time surveying Earth’s local environment for artificial debris objects, testing different strategies for observing risky asteroids (near-Earth objects) as well as testing and commissioning optical communication satellites. (The telescope is also used for quantum key distribution and feeder-link experiments.)

Part of the larger Teide Observatory, the optical ground station can detect artificial debris objects as small as 10-cm travelling in the ‘geostationary ring’ – a volume of space that comprises all geostationary orbits suitable for practical use, and one of the most valuable regions in space for telecommunications and Earth observation.

The search for fragments in the geostationary ring and a better knowledge of the current debris population are crucial to understand its future evolution, to assess the risk of collisions, and to define suitable and cost-efficient mitigation measures.

ESA’s Space Safety activities are underpinned by such accurate data from observatories around the globe, not only on space debris and asteroids but on our energetic Sun.

Find out more about how ESA works to keep people, life and infrastructure safe, here.

Credits: IQOQI Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences

The Sun as seen by the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft on 25 March 2022, one day before its closest approach of about 0.32 au, which brought it inside the orbit of planet Mercury. The central image was taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. The outer image was taken by the coronagraph Metis, an instrument that blocks out the bright light of the Sun’s surface in order to see the Sun’s faint outer atmosphere, known as the corona. The Metis image has been processed to bring out structures in the corona. This revealed the switchback (the prominent white/light blue feature at the roughly 8 o’clock position in the lower left). It appears to trace back to the active region on the surface of the Sun, where loops of magnetism have broken through the Sun’s surface.

See infographic for labeled features.

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Credits:ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI & Metis Teams and D. Telloni et al. (2022)

New Delhi, the capital and second-largest city of India, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

New Delhi is situated in the north-central part of the country and lies within the massive metropolitan area of Delhi, India’s capital territory. To the east, Delhi is bounded by the state of Uttar Pradesh, and to the north, west and south it is bounded by the state of Haryana.

Delhi’s urban area consists of the historical city of Old Delhi in the north, New Delhi in the south and now also includes the nearby cities of Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Gurugram and Noida. From space, these cityscapes together appear light grey in tone.

New Delhi sits, primarily, on the west bank of the Yamuna River, visible in black in the right of the image. One of the country’s most sacred rivers, the Yamuna is a tributary of the Ganges River, located around 160 km south of the Himalayas.

New Delhi, the government, commercial and financial centre of India, is considered one of the fastest growing cities in the country and in the world. The straight and diagonal pattern of the broad, tree-lined avenues in New Delhi, which features extensive green spaces, makes it appear as a darker-toned region and contrasts with the narrower, winding streets of Old Delhi.

The city is dotted with numerous museums, monuments, botanical gardens, places of worship and cultural buildings including the Hindu Akshardham Temple.

Other notable features in the image include Indira Gandhi International Airport visible in the left, and Hindon Airport to the right. Some perfectly squared plots of land can be seen in the image, particularly in the west side of the city.

As well as providing detailed information about Earth’s vegetation, Copernicus Sentinel-2 is designed to play a key role in mapping differences in land cover to understand the landscape, map how it is used and monitor changes over time. As cities continue to expand, Sentinel-2 can also be used to track urban expansion and assist urban planners.

This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst took this image of Hurriacane Florence on 12 September 2018, 400 km high from the International Space Station. He commented:

"Ever stared down the gaping eye of a category 4 hurricane? It's chilling, even from space."

Alexander is on his second six-month Space Station mission. Follow him and the Horizons mission on social media on his website and on his blog.

Credits: ESA/NASA–A. Gerst

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with what they say is some of their best evidence yet for the presence of a rare class of intermediate-sized black holes, having found a strong candidate lurking at the heart of the closest globular star cluster to Earth, located 6000 light-years away.

Like intense gravitational potholes in the fabric of space, virtually all black holes seem to come in two sizes: small and humongous. It’s estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes (several times the mass of our Sun) created from exploded stars. The universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes, weighing millions or billions of times our Sun’s mass and found in the centres of galaxies.

A long-sought missing link is an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing roughly 100 to 100,000 times our Sun's mass. How would they form, where would they hang out, and why do they seem to be so rare?

Astronomers have identified other possible intermediate-mass black holes using a variety of observational techniques. Two of the best candidates — 3XMM J215022.4-055108, which Hubble helped discover in 2020, and HLX-1, identified in 2009 — reside in the outskirts of other galaxies. Each of these possible black holes has the mass of tens of thousands of suns, and may have once been at the centres of dwarf galaxies.

Looking much closer to home, there have been a number of suspected intermediate-mass black holes detected in dense globular star clusters orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. For example, in 2008, Hubble astronomers announced the suspected presence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. For a number of reasons, including the need for more data, these and other intermediate-mass black hole findings still remain inconclusive and do not rule out alternative theories.

Hubble’s unique capabilities have now been used to zero-in on the core of the globular star cluster Messier 4 (M4) to go black-hole hunting with higher precision than in previous searches. “You can’t do this kind of science without Hubble,” said Eduardo Vitral of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and formerly of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP, Sorbonne University) in Paris, France, lead author on a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Vitral’s team has detected a possible intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 800 solar masses. The suspected object can’t be seen, but its mass is calculated by studying the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field, like bees swarming around a hive. Measuring their motion takes time, and a lot of precision. This is where Hubble accomplishes what no other present-day telescope can do. Astronomers looked at 12 years’ worth of M4 observations from Hubble, and resolved pinpoint stars.

ESA’s Gaia spacecraft also contributed to this result with scans of over 6000 stars that constrained the global shape of the cluster and its mass. Hubble’s data tend to rule out alternative theories for this object, such as a compact central cluster of unresolved stellar remnants like neutron stars, or smaller black holes swirling around each other.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA; CC BY 4.0

This image of a portion of 79 km-wide Ritchey Crater in the Proteus region of Mars was captured by the CaSSIS camera on the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).

The image captures the crater’s central uplift – raised from depth during the impact event that carved out the crater itself – and a variety of impact-related rocks, or ‘breccia’, which is essentially broken up fragments of the planet’s rocky surface cemented together by finer-grained material.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already identified features and minerals in this crater that suggest water was once present here. Ritchey Crater is located at 309.06°E/28.13°S, just south of Valles Marineris, where TGO also just reported evidence that vast amounts of water – in the form of ice or hydrated minerals – is still present today.

TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet’s atmospheric gases, and mapping the planet’s surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.

Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

It may not look like it, but this giant dish in Australia spends its time in in-depth conversation with a number of European deep space missions.

The 35-m antenna is part of ESA’s New Norcia ground station, located 140 kilometres north of Perth. The impressive structure is one of three such stations in the Agency’s ESTRACK network, designed for communicating with spacecraft exploring the far reaches of the Solar System.

Deep Space Antenna-1 (DSA 1) routinely provides support to Mars Express and Exomars TGO, currently orbiting the Red Planet; the Gaia space observatory, in the process of making the world's most precise map of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy; BepiColombo on its way to Mercury; and Cluster II, studying Earth's magnetic environment.

Preparations are also underway for critical 2020 events, including a crucial BepiColombo flyby and the launch of Exomars RSP and Solar Orbiter.

Discoveries by these spacecraft and others would not be possible without ESA ground stations collecting their data, making it available to researchers across the globe and ensuring we can command and communicate with the explorers from our Operations Centre on Earth.

Credits: ESA / D. O'Donnell

The first Meteosat Third Generation Imager (MTG-I1) satellite lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 13 December at 21:30 CET.

From geostationary orbit, 36,000 km above the equator, this all-new weather satellite will provide state-of-the art observations of Earth’s atmosphere and realtime monitoring of lightning events, taking weather forecasting to the next level. The satellite carries two completely new instruments: Europe’s first Lightning Imager and a Flexible Combined Imager.

MTG-I1 is the first of six satellites that form the full MTG system, which will provide critical data for weather forecasting over the next 20 years. In full operations, the mission will comprise two MTG-I satellites and one MTG Sounding (MTG-S) satellites working in tandem.

Credits: ESA - M. Pedoussaut

The first spacewalk to service the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) could not have gone better. Lead spacewalker ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano is imaged here hitching a ride on the International Space Station’s 16-metre long robotic arm to kick off the first of four ventures to service the particle physics detector on 15 November.

While all spacewalks are a carefully planned and detailed affair, the four spacewalks for AMS are exceptionally difficult as the bus-sized dark matter detector was never designed to be maintained in space. But after three successful years of delivering ground breaking science, the decision was made to extend its lifetime.

The cooling pumps for AMS-02 need maintenance and without them it will no longer be able to collect data on the cosmic rays that are bombarding our planet. The first question spacewalk designers had to answer whether this was even possible.

The first spacewalk proved it was not only possible, but thanks to the planning and trained that began as early as 2017, Luca and his spacewalking partner Andrew Morgan could achieve more than scheduled – setting them in good stead for the next phase.

The spacewalk began, as they all do, with “prebreathing” for up to two hours. Similar to scuba divers, astronauts can suffer from the ‘bends’: quickly changing pressure can turn the nitrogen in human bodies into bubbles with serious symptoms. To avoid this, astronauts breathe pure oxygen to purge their bodies of nitrogen.

Luca and NASA astronaut Drew Morgan left the depressurised Quest airlock at 13:10 CET (12:10 GMT), with Luca grabbing the ride to AMS on the robotic arm controlled by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir while Drew ferried handrails and equipment by hand to the worksite.

The main task of this spacewalk was to remove the debris shield covering AMS, with an estimated three hours portioned for this task. Luca and Drew managed to jettison the debris shield to burn up safely in Earth’s atmosphere well ahead of schedule.

Luca and Drew also installed three handrails in the vicinity of AMS to prepare for the next spacewalks and removed zip ties on the AMS’ vertical support strut.

Amazingly, the duo were still well ahead of the six hours planned for the main task of removing the debris shield.

When time permits, mission control give spacewalkers some “get ahead” tasks. Although there were no get-ahead tasks planned for this spacewalk the duo was so far ahead of schedule that mission control agreed they continue work originally planned for the second AMS spacewalk. Luca removed the screws from a carbon-fibre cover under the insulation and passed the cover to Drew to jettison once again.

The pair cleaned up, took some photos of their killer views, gathered tools, and made their way back to the airlock, clocking in 6 hours and 39 minutes for this promising start to AMS maintenance.

The next spacewalk is scheduled for 22 November. Watch the spacewalk via ESA Web TV.

Got questions about AMS? Post them using the hashtag #SpacewalkForAMS on Twitter and follow the hashtag for the latest.

Credits: ESA/NASA

The International Space Station experiences big changes in temperature as it goes from sunlight to darkness twice every 90 minutes in outer space.

The thermal control system pumps fluids through the Station to keep the temperature stable for astronauts, experiments and equipment.

The internal water loop collects heat from the cabin air, experiments and equipment via cold plates and via an air conditioner similar to those used on Earth.

The heat collected inside the station transferred to an external loop via heat exchangers. The external fluid loop contains ammonia instead of water.

Credits: ESA–K. Oldenburg

This map shows the temperature of the land surface on 2 August 2021. It is clear to see that surface temperatures in Turkey and Cyprus have reached over 50°C, again. A map we published on 2 July shows pretty much the same situation. The Mediterranean has been suffering a heatwave for some weeks, leading to numerous wildfires. Turkey, for example, is reported to be amid the country’s worst blazes in at least a decade.

The map here was generated using data from Copernicus Sentinel-3’s Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer. While weather forecasts use predicted air temperatures, this satellite instrument measures the real amount of energy radiating from Earth – and depicts the real temperature of the land surface.

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites also carry camera-like instruments, which captured smoke billowing from the fires in Turkey on 30 July.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

A specially upgraded radio-frequency chamber in ESA’s technical heart is testing what is set to become the smallest radar system to be flown in space, hosted aboard a breadbox-sized spacecraft.

Scheduled to fly to the Didymos binary asteroid system with ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence in 2024, the compact radar aboard the Juventas CubeSat will perform the first ever radar sounding inside an asteroid. Juventas will peer up to 100 m deep within the 160-m-diameter Dimorphos moonlet of the 780-m-diameter Didymos asteroid.

CubeSats are mini-satellites built up from standardised 10-cm boxes. Juventas is a ‘6-unit’ CubeSat, measuring 10x20x30 cm, while its quartet of radar antennas measure 1.5 m long each. So the test campaign includes a structural model of the Juventas CubeSat, to evaluate how the body of the miniature spacecraft might affect the radar signals.

The test campaign is taking place inside the ‘Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone’ or Hertz chamber at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands. However testing here only became feasible after a skillful upgrade.

“An essential element of anechoic test chambers like Hertz are the radio-absorbing foam spikes lining the inside walls, allowing tests to mimic the infinite void of space,” explains ESA antenna engineer Paul Moseley.

“But typically Hertz can only test down to 400 MHz, while Hertz’s main antennas will radiate at 60 MHz. At this frequency the spikes no longer absorb signals, so instead of a dark room the chamber would be turned into a hall of mirrors, throwing out multiple radio reflections that interfere with the accuracy of our measurements.”

ESA’s Hertz team worked with MVG in Italy to devise a new setup making lower frequency testing possible, initially as part of a general upgrade but then specially targeted to enable Juventas testing.

Paul adds: “It’s a combination of hardware and software that allows us to measure in this environment but still reconstruct the correct results, including fibreglass support towers that are transparent to antennas and software that combines measurements made at many different points across the room, in order to cancel out the reflection effects.”

Franco Perez Lissi of ESA’s CubeSats Systems Unit is overseeing the Juventas testing: “We’re measuring the radiation pattern in a full sphere surrounding the antennas- the results of which should also be very useful for Juventas’s critical design review, taking place next month – as well as the total radiated power. This entire campaign additionally serves as a dress rehearsal of sorts for the flight model of Juventas, which is scheduled to be tested here in early 2023.”

The radar aboard Juventas is developed from the Rosetta spacecraft’s CONSERT radar system, which peered into the interior of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is a synthetic aperture radar design, meaning it will take advantage of Juventas’s orbit 3 km above the surface of Dimorphos to integrate together multiple signal reflections and resolve them into images.

“We are proud to see Rosetta’s legacy living on in the next generation of deep-space missions,” adds Alain Herique of the University of Grenoble, Principal Investigator of Juventa’s JuRa low-frequency radar.

Juventas is being led for ESA by GomSpace company in Luxembourg with GMV in Romania, with its radar developed by the Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble group at the University Grenoble and Technical University Dresden, with Astronika in Poland constructing the antennas and EmTroniX in Luxembourg contributing the signal generation system.

Hera will also be embarking a second deep space CubeSat, the Italian-led Milani, which will employ a multispectral imager to prospect the asteroid’s surface composition. Hera will be preceded to the Didymos asteroids by NASA’s DART spacecraft which will perform a test deflection of the smaller body. DART is due for launch next Wednesday, 24 November.

Credits: ESA-P. de Maagt

Few of the Universe’s residents are as iconic as the spiral galaxy. These limelight-hogging celestial objects combine whirling, pinwheeling arms with scatterings of sparkling stars, glowing bursts of gas, and dark, weaving lanes of cosmic dust, creating truly awesome scenes — especially when viewed through a telescope such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, this image from Hubble frames a perfect spiral specimen: the stunning NGC 2903.

NGC 2903 is located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion), and was studied as part of a Hubble survey of the central regions of roughly 145 nearby disc galaxies. This study aimed to help astronomers better understand the relationship between the black holes that lurk at the cores of galaxies like these, and the rugby-ball-shaped bulge of stars, gas, and dust at the galaxy’s centre — such as that seen in this image.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Ho et al.; CC BY 4.0

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Chachani mountain in Peru. Standing at over 6000 m, Chachani is the tallest of the mountains near the Peruvian city of Arequipa. The outskirts of the city and part of the airport runway are just visible in the centre bottom of the image. The city is home to around 900 000 people and is renowned for its dramatic cityscape, surrounded by three volcanoes. Chachani is shown in the centre of the image.

Arequipa is also known as la Ciudad Blanca or the White City thanks to the prevalence of baroque buildings carved from white volcanic sillar stone in its centre. The volcanoes, overlooking the city, naturally form an important part of the city’s identity.

Heavy shades of red, showing vegetated areas, dominate this false-colour image. The varying tones represent different vegetation types, at different stages in the annual vegetation cycle. The near-infrared channel of Copernicus Sentinel-2 has been used to achieve this false-colour effect. A number of crops are grown in this area, including maize, asparagus and hot peppers (rocotos), which feature in many local dishes, such as the region’s signature dish of rocoto relleno.

In the centre-right of the image we can see a body of water called Aguada Blanca. This is part of a protected natural area, covering 360 000 hectares. Llamas and alpacas live here, as well as flamingos which have made the surrounding lagoons and wetlands of the Andean plains their home. Wool trade is a huge industry for the region, with artisan crafts also booming in recent years.

Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring programme. Sentinel-2’s main instrument has 13 spectral bands, and is designed to provide images that can be used to distinguish different types of vegetation and monitor plant growth.

This image, which was captured on 14 July 2017, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The city of Fairbanks, the largest city in the Interior region of Alaska, and its surroundings, are featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

Visible in the top-left corner of the image, Fairbanks is located in the central Tanana Valley, straddling the Chena River near its confluence with the Tanana River – a 940 km tributary of the Yukon River. Dominating this week’s image, the Tanana River’s name is an Athabascan word meaning ‘river trail’. Many low streams and rivers flow into the Tanana River.

The river flows in a northwest direction along the base of the Alaska Range (visible in the bottom of the image) before joining the Yukon River near the village of Tanana. The river drains the north slopes of the high Alaska Range and is fed by several glaciers. The sediment-laden Tanana is rich in minerals, which gives it its milky colour.

South of the Tanana River lies the Tanana Flats, an area of marsh and bog that stretches for more than 160 km until it rises into the Alaska Range. One of the components of the Alaskan mountains, the Alaska Range extends for around 650 km in a generally east-west arc from the Aleutian Range to the boundary of Yukon. The mountain range can sometimes be seen from Fairbanks on clear days. The highest mountain in North America, the Denali, lies in the Alaska Range and reaches an elevation of over 6000 m (not visible).

Around 20 km from Fairbanks lies the city of North Pole. Despite its name, the city is around 2700 km south of Earth’s geographic North Pole and around 200 km south of the Arctic Circle.

Light green colours in the image indicate deciduous forest, while dark green represents evergreen forests.

Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus programme. The mission’s frequent revisits over the same area and high spatial resolution allow changes in both land and water bodies to be closely monitored.

This image, captured on 11 September 2021, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

This image captured by the CaSSIS camera on the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on 19 May 2021 features active dust devils northeast of Amazonis Planitia (35.2°N/210.1°E).

Dust devils usually appear as small vortexes and slightly bluer in CaSSIS false colour composite images like these. These dust vortexes often ‘clean’ the surface by removing a thin dust layer, leaving a dark trail behind known as a dust devil track.

Dust devils on Mars form in the same way as those on Earth: when the ground gets hotter than the air above it, rising plumes of hot air move through cooler denser air, creating an updraft, with the cooler air sinking and setting up a vertical circulation. If a horizontal gust of wind blows through, the dust devil is triggered. Once whirling fast enough, the spinning funnels can pick up dust and push it around the surface.

This image was acquired in the middle of spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars, a season that is characterised by increased dust devil activity.

TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet’s atmospheric gases, and mapping the planet’s surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.

Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO