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What if you could generate wind power without needing to build wind turbine towers? Dutch company Ampyx Power is developing flying kite-like tethered drones to harness energy directly from high-altitude wind. ESA’s NAVISP programme is supporting the company in developing a precision takeoff and landing system, allowing the drones to land automatically as needed.
Flying at high-wind altitudes above 200 m, Ampyx Power’s tethered drones turn winches on the ground that are linked in turn to a generator, producing power. Intended to operate over rugged terrain or offshore, the autonomous drones will take off and land on small platforms, allowing inspection and maintenance.
Their launch and land deck will be smaller than the wingspan of the aircraft. To ensure a safe landing, high accuracy, availability and integrity of the relative positioning between aircraft and platform will be essential – able to go on operating seamlessly in case of satnav outage.
ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP), focused on future navigation technologies, is therefore working with Ampyx Power and UK tracking specialist OmniSense to develop a robust backup local positioning system. The aim is to harness ultra-wideband positioning techniques to provide 10 cm of relative positioning accuracy, updating every hundredth of a second 100 Hz with an operating range up to 1 km.
The technology also holds wider potential, such as the safe control of autonomous vehicles within smart cities. To find out more, see Ampyx Power’s video here.
Credits: Ampyx Power
ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer is back in Cologne, Germany, after 177 days in space and 175 days aboard the International Space Station for his first mission ‘Cosmic Kiss’.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying Matthias and his Crew-3 crew mates, NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron, splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa, USA, at 06:43 BST/07:43 CEST on Friday 6 May. The journey from Space Station to splashdown took just over 23 hours.
After its water landing, the Crew Dragon capsule was hoisted aboard a recovery boat where the hatch was opened, and the astronauts were welcomed home.
Matthias underwent initial medical checks aboard the boat before being flown by helicopter to shore and boarding a plane to Cologne. He will spend the next weeks participating in debriefings, providing samples for scientific evaluation and readapting to Earth’s gravity at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC) and the German Aerospace Centre’s (DLR) ‘Envihab’ facility.
Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot
This image shows a section of the Taurus Molecular Cloud based on a combination of data from ESA’s Herschel and Planck space telescopes. The bright areas in the picture shows the emission by interstellar dust grains in three different wavelengths observed by Herschel (250, 350, and 500 microns) and the lines crossing the image in a ‘drapery pattern’ represent the magnetic field orientation (based on the Planck data.)
This molecular cloud is one of the closest regions of star formation, at around 450 light years from us, and is known to contain more than 250 young stellar objects. The section in this image shows the archetypical example of a filament in a star-forming cloud. The main filament that stretches from the left of the image and curves up to the hub is known as the Lynds Dark Nebula 1495 (L1495).
L1495 contains several Barnard Dark Nebulae, which are dust-filled regions cataloged by astronomer Edward Bernard in 1919 and known as Barnard Objects. Dark nebulae are extremely dense regions of dust that obscure visible light. The central bright region is known as B10, with B211 and B213 stretching out from the bright area.
The B213/L1495 nebula is a clear example of a star-forming region where the magnetic field lines are perpendicular to the main filament, and also contains striations, or material that appears perpendicular to the filament.
Credits: ESA/Herschel/Planck; J. D. Soler, MPIA
The moment ESA's latest mission left the International Space Station: the Qarman reentry CubeSat developed with Belgium's Von Karman Institute was deployed by NASA astronaut Andrew 'Drew' Morgan via a Nanoracks dispenser on 19 February 2020. Qarman will now fall gradually to Earth, to eventually gather valuable data on atmospheric reentry physics. Read more
Credits: NASA
This 70 km-wide crater shows interesting internal features, including a smaller crater (foreground), exposed light-toned deposits (foreground/centre), and chaotic terrain (background), as well as slumped crater walls.
The oblique perspective view was generated using data from the Mars Express high-resolution stereo camera stereo channels. This scene is part of the region imaged on 13 March 2007 and 22 February 2017 during orbits 4090 and 16648. The image mosaic is centred on 346°E/23°S, with a ground resolution of 15–17 m/pixel.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over part of Abu Dhabi – one of the seven emirates that constitute the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Covering an area of approximately 67 000 sq km, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi is the largest emirate in the UAE – accounting for around 87% of the total land area of the federation. Abu Dhabi has around 200 islands lying along its 700 km long coastline.
The city of Abu Dhabi, after which the emirate is named, is located on an island in the Persian Gulf and can be seen slightly below the centre of the image. Abu Dhabi is the capital and the second-most populous city of the UAE – after Dubai. The city is directly connected to the mainland by three bridges: Maqta, Mussafah and Sheikh Zayed.
Just east of the city lies the Mangrove National Park, visible as a dark green patch of land. The protected area is around 20 sq km and includes mangrove forests, salt marshes, mudflats and is home to more than 60 bird species.
The waters surrounding Abu Dhabi are said to hold the world’s largest population of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins. The lighter aqua colours are shallow waters, which contrast with the dark coloured waters of the Gulf.
The iconic red roof of Ferrari World can be seen in the centre-right of the image. The Ferrari-themed park is located on Yas Island and is said to be the world’s largest indoor theme park. Abu Dhabi International Airport is visible southeast of the park.
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 water bodies to be closely monitored.
This image, captured on 27 January 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
Ariane 5 flight VA254 with the Eutelsat Quantum and Star One D2 satellites is being rolled out from the Final Assembly Building (BAF) to the ELA-3 (Ensemble de Lancement Ariane) Ariane 5 launch complex, at Europe's Space Port in Kourou, French Guyana on 29 July 2021.
Quantum, the ESA Partnership Project with Eutelsat, Airbus and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, is a pioneering mission preparing the way for the next generation of telecommunications satellites, which will be more flexible by design and so more adaptable to customer needs once in orbit.
Quantum is a shift from custom-designed satellite with one-off payloads to a more generic approach, resulting in unprecedented in-orbit reconfigurability in coverage, frequency and power, allowing complete mission rehaul, including orbital position.
ESA partnered with satellite operator Eutelsat and manufacturer Airbus to design this programme, in response to today's market requiring satellites to be able to respond to changes in geographical or performance demand, either during manufacturing or after launch. This will enable the operator to address emerging business opportunities — even those that appear after it has ordered a satellite.
Such ESA Partnership Projects maximise the benefits to industry thanks to an efficient, co-managed approach that is tailored to commercial best practice.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This image shows craters, valleys and chaotic terrain in Mars’ Pyrrhae Regio in 3D when viewed using red-green or red-blue glasses. This anaglyph was derived from data obtained by the nadir and stereo channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express during spacecraft orbit 20972 (3 August 2020). It covers a part of the martian surface centred at 322°E/16°S. North is to the right.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Ariane 5 VA 260 with Juice ready for launch on the ELA-3 launch pad at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on 12 April 2023.
Juice – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. This ambitious mission will characterise Ganymede, Callisto and Europa with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the Universe.
Following launch, Juice will embark on an eight-year journey to Jupiter, arriving in July 2031 with the aid of momentum and direction gained from four gravity-assist fly-bys of the Earth-Moon system, Venus and, twice, Earth.
Flight VA 260 will be the final Ariane 5 flight to carry an ESA mission to space.
Find out more about Juice in ESA’s launch kit
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This crystal of iron pyrite, just four hundredths of a millimetre in size, could function as the light absorbing layer of a tiny solar cell – potentially a promising future source of power on the Moon.
Working with Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), ESA has studied the production of sandpaper-like rolls of such microcrystals as the basis of monograin-layer solar cells.
“We’re looking at these microcrystals in the context of future lunar settlement,” explains ESA advanced manufacturing engineer Advenit Makaya. “Future Moon bases will need to ‘live off the land’ in order to be sustainable, and the iron and sulphur needed to produce pyrite could be retrieved from the lunar surface.”
Dr. Taavi Raadik from TalTech explains: “Our aim is to develop technology for pyrite microcrystal growth and to use them in a monograin layer solar cell, where each tiny crystal would work as an individual solar cell. The amount of power generated by one miniscule solar cell is small but in the normal-sized module there would be billions of them – and in principle there is no limitation in terms of their size and shape. Additionally, we have the goal that all necessary source materials should be possible to harvest on the moon in-situ.”
TalTech PhD student Katriin Kristmann is having her work on this topic co-sponsored by TalTech and ESA’s Discovery & Preparation programme. She explains: “We are happy to work with that very ambitious project. Through this partnership we will have a chance to take Estonian science to the Moon.”
The project will include the opportunity for Katriin to make use of laboratory facilities of ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands to perform detailed studies of crystal quality.
“This is only one of a range of in-situ resource utilisation methods that ESA has been researching for the Moon or further afield,” adds Advenit.
Power availability is an important factor in selecting the site of a future Moon base. The lunar south pole is favoured, for instance, because of adjacent ‘peaks of near-eternal light’ where solar power is almost continuously available. At lower lunar latitudes settlers would have to contend with two-week long nights.
Credits: TalTech
Vega-C VV21 with LARES-2 ready for launch as the gantry is being retracted on 13 July 2022 at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Vega-C brings a new level of performance to ESA's launch family. With new first and second stages and an uprated fourth stage, Vega-C increases performance to about 2.3 t in a reference 700 km polar orbit, from the 1.5 t capability of its predecessor, Vega.
Vega-C features a new, more powerful first stage, P120C, based on Vega’s P80. Atop that is a new second stage, Zefiro-40, and then the same Zefiro-9 third stage as used on Vega.
The re-ignitable upper stage is also improved. AVUM+ has increased liquid propellant capacity, to deliver payloads to multiple orbits depending on mission requirements and to allow for longer operational time in space, to enable extended missions.
The P120C motor will do double service, with either two or four units acting as strap-on boosters for Ariane 6. Sharing this component streamlines industrial efficiency and improves cost-effectiveness of both launchers.
With its larger main stages and bigger fairing – which doubles the payload volume compared to Vega – Vega-C measures 34.8 m high, nearly 5 m taller than Vega.
The new launcher configuration delivers a significant improvement in launch system flexibility. Vega-C can orbit larger satellites, two main payloads or can accommodate various arrangements for rideshare missions. ESA’s upcoming Space Rider return-to-Earth vehicle will be launched to orbit on Vega-C.
Credits: ESA - M. Pedoussaut
Space Science image of the week:
An abstract sketch by Aoife van Linden Tol, the recipient of the first ESA–Ars Electronica residency, created in May 2017 during her second stay at ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands.
The sketch, made with charcoal powder and pigments, is inspired by multicolour images of the Sun like those collected with the ESA/NASA SOHO observatory.
As an artist working primarily with explosive media, Aoife often makes preparatory sketches and designs by throwing charcoal powder and pigments on to paper.
During the residency, she has been researching for her Star Storm project, an explosive performance inspired by stars, including the Sun. The performance will be premiered in September during the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.
This sketch, Lost in the Photosphere, is a preliminary idea for one of the various segments in her immersive performance. The aim of this segment is to let the audience experience the turbulent processes that happen inside the Sun as if they were standing in the photosphere.
To develop the overall story arc of the performance as well as fine-tuning the details of the explosions it will include, the artist organised a series of brainstorming sessions with ESA space scientists. During these conversations, she presented individual aspects of the performance and invited the scientists to discuss the relevant physical processes and how to best represent them using a variety of explosive media.
In the spirit of a two-way exchange during this residency, the artist also offered scientists and other ESA employees a peek into her creative practice and allow them to explore their own creative thinking processes related to science by organising a workshop and a participatory live-art event. During these events, participants experimented with various media and techniques to create artworks.
This art–science residency is organised by Ars Electronica in partnership with ESA. An international jury that included ESA, Ars Electronica and Futurelab, and the European Digital Art and Science Network selected Aoife’s proposal from the 139 submitted projects in 2016.
More about Aoife’s residency on the art&science@ESA blog.
Credit: A. van Linden Tol
ESA engineers need to be certain of the strength and tensile behaviour of candidate materials for coming space missions – so they pull them apart.
This tensile testing machine (otherwise known as a universal testing machine) does exactly that: a test sample is placed between its two sets of ‘jaws’ and subjected to a steadily increasing pull force, until the moment of fracture.
The applied force and resulting deformation can be tracked precisely using a photogrammetry system – note the camera to the left – while the final fracture pattern becomes the subject of detailed analysis.
“Being able to measure the fundamental properties of a wide variety of materials is essential to good design, modelling and testing of spacecraft components,” explains ESA Materials and Processes engineer Nathan Bamsley. “Testing in an accurate and repeatable manner using calibrated equipment that you trust is absolutely vital.”
This tensile testing machine is part of ESA’s Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory, one of 35 technical laboratories based at the European Space Technology and Research Centre, ESTEC, based at Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
Made up of dozens of dedicated experimental facilities and hundreds of instruments overall, the Materials and Electrical Components Lab is dedicated to guaranteeing an optimal choice of materials, processes and electrical components for ESA missions and projects, bearing in mind the unique environmental challenges involved around designing for space operations.
A designated certification authority for materials and processes, the Lab is open to customers from all backgrounds for testing work. 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
The Rosalind Franklin rover of the joint ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars mission completed a series of environmental tests at the end of 2019 at Airbus, Toulouse, France. This included final thermal and vacuum tests where the Rover is heated and cooled to simulate the temperatures of its journey through space and on the surface of Mars. For example, Rosalind Franklin can expect temperatures dropping to –120°C outside, and –50 °C inside the rover once on Mars. It must also be able to operate in less than one hundredth of Earth’s atmospheric pressure – and in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
Last year the ‘structural and thermal model’ of the rover successfully completed a rigorous environmental test campaign; the latest round of tests subjected the real flight-model to the simulated space environment.
Now the focus moves to final checks on the rover systems. This includes checking the alignment of instruments working together, such as the imaging systems, and a final functional test of the integrated system after the environmental campaign. Once these verifications on the rover are completed, a functional check of the interfaces with the surface platform and descent module that will deliver it safely to the surface of Mars will be performed at Thales Alenia Space, Cannes, France.
The primary goal of the mission is to determine if there is or there has ever been life on Mars, and to better understand the history of water on the planet. The rover will seek out interesting geological locations to examine with its scientific tools and to drill to retrieve underground samples, on a quest to tackle these questions.
The mission is foreseen for launch in the launch window 26 July–11 August 2020 on a Russian Proton-M rocket with a Breeze-M upper stage from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, arriving at Mars 19 March 2021.
Credits: Airbus
This image, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, shows the average carbon monoxide concentrations from 1 to 10 July 2022 owing to the ongoing wildfires in Alaska and Canada.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Falcon 9 Crew Dragon spacecraft "Endurance" is being readied for the launch of Crew-3 now set for 3 November 2021 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It is the first spaceflight for ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will be the 600th human to fly to space.
On Station, Matthias will become a long-duration crew member, spending around six months living and working in orbit. During this time, he will support more than 35 European experiments and numerous international experiments on board.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
Robots and humans assembled their brains and artificial intelligence (AI) for Moon exploration at the ESA-ESRIC Space Resources Challenge. A team proved that when it comes to surveying uncharted worlds, working together is the most efficient approach.
12 teams from across Europe and Canada competed to find resources in a mock lunar surface. Over 200 tonnes of lava and rock, a hundred boulders and tricky slopes in a former aircraft hangar mimicked the surface of our Moon. The lighting recreated the long shadows that are projected around the Moon’s South Pole and the teams competing had to deal with a five-second communication delay as if they were 385 000 km away.
The teams developed different strategies traversing the unknown terrain and collecting samples for science analysis during two field tests in the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 2022.
This picture shows members of the Autonomous Robots for In-Situ Surface Exploration team (ARISE) at work to help their four robots complete the mission during the second campaign in Luxembourg, in September 2022.
ARISE won the Space Resources Challenge after their rovers managed to track down their own location in the simulated Moon, finding the safest passages and analysing the composition of the rocks as a potential resource.
Lunar resources such as oxygen, metals, soil and water are likely to play a large role in space economies. Making use of these resources will be crucial for sustainable space exploration, and the Moon is a promising target for extracting resources.
In a simulated lunar treasure hunt, teams made use of swarm robotics, an AI democracy where robots autonomously reach an agreement on how to accomplish their goal. The robots decided where to explore and which instruments were more suitable for each task.
The organisers praised ARISE’s skills at autonomy, mapping and mobility. The winning team was made of a consortium of European organisations, including the FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, ETH Zurich, and the universities of Zurich, Basel and Bern.
ESA has launched a new campaign to identify technological gaps and find solutions for resource extraction on the Moon. A fresh call for ideas will serve to define the theme of the next edition of the Space Resource Challenge.
Watch the highlights of the first challenge and participate in the call for ideas.
ESA’s next astronaut to fly to the International Space Station, Andreas Mogensen, will continue ESA’s ground-breaking research into human and robotic exploration. Andreas first mission, ‘iriss’ proved that humans can control robots from an orbiting space station when he performed tasks through a robot on Earth with millimeter precision. His next mission, Huginn is launching this year and will see Andreas controlling a swarm of robots on Earth from space, pushing the human-robot alliance even further.
The Moon awaits you and your robots.
Credits: ESRIC
This Copernicus Sentinel-1 image takes us just south of the US border, to the region of Baja California in northwest Mexico. Its capital city, Mexicali, is visible top left of the image.
This false colour image contains three separate images overlaid on top of each other. Captured on 30 April, 12 May and 17 June, the different colours represent changes that occurred on the ground.
The Colorado River, which forms the border between Baja California and Sonora, can be seen cutting through the rich and colourful patchwork of agricultural land at the top right of the image, before it fans out and splits into multiple streams. Flowing for over 2300 km, the Colorado River rises in the central Rocky Mountains in Colorado, flows through the Grand Canyon before crossing the Mexican border and emptying into the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez.
The Colorado River delta once covered a large area of land and, owing to its nutrients carried downstream, supported a large population of plant and bird life. However today, water that flows is trapped by dams and is used for residential use, electricity generation as well as crop irrigation for the nearby Imperial Valley and Mexicali Valley. The reduction in flow by dams and diversions traps the majority of the river’s sediments before they reach the Gulf of California, impacting water quality.
Copernicus Sentinel-1 is a two-satellite mission, each carrying a radar instrument that can see through clouds and rain. As a constellation of two satellites orbiting 180° apart, the mission can repeat observations every six days, which is also useful for monitoring evolving situations.
This image 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
Euclid’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument is dedicated to measuring the amount of light that galaxies emit at each wavelength. It will image the sky in infrared light (900–2000 nm) to measuring the brightness and intensity of light. This image was taken during commissioning of Euclid to check that the focused instrument worked as expected.
This is a raw image taken using NISP’s ‘Y’ filter. Because it is largely unprocessed, some unwanted artefacts remain – for example the cosmic rays that shoot straight across, seen especially in the VIS image. The Euclid Consortium will ultimately turn the longer-exposed survey observations into science-ready images that are artefact-free, more detailed, and razor sharp.
This first NISP image is already full of detail; we see spiral and elliptical galaxies, nearby and distant stars, star clusters, and much more. But the area of sky that it covers is actually only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon.
Euclid’s telescope collected light for 100 seconds to enable NISP to create this image. During nominal operation, it is expected to capture light for roughly five times longer, unveiling many more distant galaxies.
Before it reaches the detector, NISP sends incoming light through either a photometry filter or a spectrometry grism. In this image, the light from Euclid’s telescope has passed through the photometry filter.
This image shows only a small part of NISP’s huge field of view. Click here for the full image.
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This is the main camera that ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence will be relying on to explore and manoeuvre around the Didymos asteroid system.
Hera – named after the Greek goddess of marriage – will be, along with NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids.
The DART spacecraft – due for launch this November – will first perform a kinetic impact on the smaller of the two bodies. Hera will follow-up with a detailed post-impact survey to turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable asteroid deflection technique.
Produced by Jena-Optronik in Germany, this lightweight camera is being supplied to OHB System AG, leading the Hera industrial consortium for ESA. The camera will be used both for spacecraft navigation and scientific study of the two asteroids’ surfaces.
The camera is based on Jena-Optronik’s existing ASTROhead design. ASTROhead has already been proven in space, aboard Northrop Grumman‘s Mission Extension Vehicle, MEV-1 in 2019, helping it perform a historic autonomous docking with a geostationary telecommunication satellite in order to extend the satellite's working lifetime.
Credits: Jena-Optronik
The aptly named Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is remarkably Earth-like. Its diameter is only about 40% that of our planet, but Titan’s nitrogen-rich, dense atmosphere and the geological activity at the moon’s surface make comparisons between the two bodies inevitable.
This image, taken with the radar on the Cassini spacecraft, shows just how similar the features in Titan’s surface are to Earth’s landforms.
Aside from Earth, Titan is the only other body where we have found evidence of active erosion on a large scale. There are seas, lakes and rivers filled with liquid hydrocarbons – mainly methane and some ethane – that etch the moon’s surface, in much the same way water erodes Earth’s.
A striking example is Vid Flumina, the Nile-like, branching river system visible on the upper-left quadrant of the image. The river, in the moon’s north polar region, flows into Ligeia Mare, a methane-rich sea that appears as a dark patch on the right side of the image.
Researchers in Italy and the US analysed Cassini radar observations from May 2013 and recently revealed that the narrow channels that branch off Vid Flumina are deep, steep-sided canyons filled with flowing hydrocarbons.
The channels are a little less than a kilometre wide, up to 570 m deep and with slopes steeper than 40º. This suggests they have been sculpted by liquid methane, flowing into the main Vid Flumina river, that has persistently eroded the canyon walls – a geological process reminiscent of the carving of river gorges on our planet.
The study is the first direct evidence of deeply entrenched, methane-flooded channels on Titan. Finding out how they formed provides insights into the moon’s origin and evolution and could help understand similar geological processes on Earth.
The Cassini–Huygens radar team is hoping to observe the Ligeia Mare and Vid Flumina region again in April 2017, during Cassini’s final approach to Titan. The mission is a cooperation between NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.
Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI
Integration of the Orion spacecraft on top of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The European Service Module that will power the first Orion uncrewed flight, ESM-1, was lifted up and mated with the rocket in preparation for launch, together with the crew module. Integration began on 20 October 2021, and the spacecraft was secured atop the powerful rocket six days later.
Artemis I is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions for human deep space exploration. The European Service Module will power Orion's crew module around the Moon and back with over 30 engines. The European Service Module provides electricity, water, oxygen and nitrogen as well as keeping the spacecraft at the right temperature and on course.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
The BepiColombo mission to Mercury passed a review milestone last week, confirming that it can leave Europe and begin preparations for launch at the Kourou spaceport.
The spacecraft and ground equipment, along with personnel, will start transferring to Kourou towards the end of next month. The launch window opens on 5 October until 29 November 2018.
This montage of artist’s impressions represents a selection of new images released today showcasing the spacecraft elements in different situations during the mission’s seven-year cruise to the innermost planet.
Some images highlight the moments following launch on the Ariane 5, while others feature flybys at Earth, Venus and Mercury. BepiColombo will fly by Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury six times, using the planets’ gravity to help set course, before entering orbit around Mercury.
BepiColombo is Europe’s first mission to the innermost planet and comprises three spacecraft. The ESA-built Mercury Transfer Module will carry the two science orbiters – ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter – to Mercury. After arriving at Mercury, the trio will separate in stages – some of these moments are also visualised in the new artist’s views.
Once at Mercury, the two science orbiters will make complementary observations of the planet and its environment, from its deep interior to interaction with the solar wind, to provide the best understanding of the planet to date and how the innermost planet of a solar system forms and evolves close to its parent star.
BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.
The views of Mercury in this montage are based on imagery from NASA's Mariner 10 and Messenger missions.
Credits: ESA/ATG medialab
We’ve sent numerous missions into space to study the Sun; past and present solar explorers include ESA’s Proba-2 (PRoject for OnBoard Autonomy 2) and SOHO (SOlar Heliospheric Observatory) probes, NASA’s SDO and STEREO missions (the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, respectively), and the joint NASA/ESA Ulysses mission. However, most of these spacecraft have focused mainly on the equatorial regions of the Sun, with the notable exception of Ulysses – this probe observed our star at a wide range of latitudes for nearly two decades, until the mission came to an end in 2009.
Despite Ulysses’ insights, this focus on low solar latitudes has left the Sun’s poles relatively unexplored. A lack of imaging data means that scientists must get creative in piecing together pictures of the Sun’s polar regions – as seen here in this artificial image of the solar north pole.
This image extrapolates low-latitude Proba-2 observations of the Sun to reconstruct a view of the star’s pole. While the poles cannot be seen directly, when spacecraft observe the solar atmosphere they gather data on everything along their line of sight, also viewing the atmosphere extending around the disc of the Sun (the apparent glow around the main disc of the Sun, which also extends over the poles). Scientists can use this to infer the appearance of the polar regions. In order to estimate the properties of the solar atmosphere over the poles, they continuously image the main disc of the Sun and take small slivers of data from the outer and upper regions of the star as it rotates, compensating for the fact that the Sun does not rotate at constant speeds at all latitudes. Over time, these small arrays of data can be combined to approximate a view of the pole, as shown in this view. More in-depth information on the process used to create this image can be found here.
Signs of this patchwork approach can be seen in this image, which comprises data from Proba-2’s extreme-ultraviolet SWAP imager. The line across the middle is created due to small changes in the solar atmosphere that occurred over the timeframe of creating this image. This image also shows a bright bulge on the upper-right side of the Sun; this is created by a low-latitude coronal hole rotating around the solar disc. The polar coronal hole region, which can be seen as the dark patch in the centre of the solar disc, is a source of fast solar wind. It is seen here to contain a subtle network of light and dark structures, which may cause variations in solar wind speed.
While such views go a way towards revealing the secrets of the Sun’s poles – such as how waves propagate across our star, and how it may create phenomena such as coronal holes and ejections that go on to influence space weather around the Earth – direct observations of these regions are needed in order to build on past data gathered by Ulysses. ESA’s Solar Orbiter aims to plug this knowledge gap when it launches in 2020. This mission will study the Sun in detail from latitudes high enough to explore its polar regions, also revealing how its magnetic field and particle emissions impact its cosmic environment – including the area of space that we call home.
Credits: ESA/Royal Observatory of Belgium
Colour view of Neukum Crater in the Noachis Terra region on Mars.
The crater is about 102 km wide and 1 km deep, with two shallow depressions and a dune field in its interior.
The crater was named after Gerhard Neukum, who developed the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.
The images were acquired by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express on 31 December 2005, 24 May 2007 and 27 May 2007, corresponding to orbits 2529, 4346 and 4357, respectively. The scene covers the region 26–31°E / 42–47°S. The colour image was created using data from the nadir channel, the field of view of which is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and the camera’s colour channels. North is to the right.
Read the associated news article here.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Europe strengthened its connection to space on Wednesday 27 January, as NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins (white suit with red stripes) and Victor Glover (plain white suit) installed the Columbus KA-band antenna (ColKa) outside ESA’s Columbus laboratory on the International Space Station.
This antenna will create an additional bi-directional KA-band data transmission for the Space Station, providing a direct link between the Columbus laboratory and Europe, for researchers and astronauts, at home broadband speeds.
Victor transported the fridge-sized unit from the airlock to the worksite on the Canadarm2 robotic arm, with assistance from NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi inside the Station. There, he and Mike set to work unscrewing and screwing bolts to hold the antenna in place and routing cables for power and data, guided by the voice of ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen from NASA’s mission control centre in Houston.
Mike and Victor also connected power cables for external commercial research platform Bartolomeo, located outside Columbus. This connection will be continued during a future spacewalk.
Credits: NASA
Ahead of the upcoming Ariane 5 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Kourou – home to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, an overseas department of France.
Located around 60 km northwest of the French Guianese capital Cayenne, Kourou is a coastal town in the north-central part of the country and is visible in the lower right of the image. The town lies at the estuary of the Kourou River which, after its journey of 144 km, empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Its muddy waters appear brown most likely due to sediments picked up from the surrounding forest.
Long, white sandy beaches line the town’s ocean coast, while the riverbank and inland area consists mostly of mangrove and dense tropical rainforest. The surrounding area’s economy is largely agricultural, with coffee, cacao and tropical fruits being grown.
Just northwest of Kourou lies Europe’s Spaceport – chosen as a base from which to launch satellites in 1964 by the French Government, and currently home to ESA-developed rocket families Ariane and Vega.
As Kourou lies just 500 km north of the equator, it makes it ideally placed for launches into orbit as the rockets gain extra performance thanks to a ‘slingshot effect’ from the speed of Earth’s rotation. In addition, there is no risk of cyclones or earthquakes. This launch base and the jungle that surrounds it covers 690 sq km and protects an abundance of wildlife and plants.
From here, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space – the James Webb Space Telescope – is scheduled for launch. After liftoff, it will embark on a month-long journey to its destination, around one and a half million kilometres from Earth.
Following the footsteps of the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is designed to answer questions about the Universe and to make breakthrough discoveries in all fields of astronomy. The telescope will be able to detect infrared light generated by galaxies as they formed more than 13.5 billion years ago, in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Webb will see farther into our origins – from the Universe's first galaxies, to the birth of stars and planets, to exoplanets.
In the first month after launch, Webb will unfold its sunshield, which is around the size of a tennis court, and deploy its 6.5-metre primary mirror. This will be used to detect the faint light of distant stars and galaxies with a sensitivity of a hundred times greater than that of Hubble.
Webb is a joint project between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). Find out more about Webb in ESA’s launch kit and interactive brochure.
This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
SMART-1, ESA’s first mission to the Moon, captured this series of unique images of our home planet Earth and the Moon during a total lunar eclipse.
This eclipse took place on 28 October 2004, when SMART-1 was about 290 000 km away from Earth and about 660 000 km from the Moon. From its vantage point, the AMIE camera (Advanced Moon micro-Imager Experiment) could, for the first time, see and photograph both the Earth and Moon during a lunar eclipse.
The images were taken in visible light. Those of the Moon are shown in time sequence, from left to right, covering a period of about three and a half hours. The ‘totality’ phase, in the middle of the sequence when the Moon is completely inside the Earth’s shadow, lasted about an hour.
The images of the Earth were taken just before and after the eclipse. The size of the Earth and Moon is exactly as seen by SMART-1, but the distance between the two bodies, is not to scale (Earth and the Moon were farther apart than the field of view of AMIE and could not simultaneously fit within a single image). Earth is about 3.7 times larger than that of the Moon; their diameters are about 12 800 km and 3500 km, respectively. As SMART-1 was farther away from the Moon than from Earth, the difference appears exaggerated.
A partial lunar eclipse will be visible for many Earth-based observers this week, on 16-17 July. For observers in Europe it will begin late in the evening of 16 July and conclude in the early hours of 17 July. Partial lunar eclipses occur when the Earth moves between the Sun and the full moon, but they are not precisely aligned, so only part of the Moon’s surface moves into the darkest part of Earth’s shadow.
SMART-1, short for Small Missions for Advanced Research and Technology-1, was launched on 27 September 2003. For 14 months it followed a long, spiralling trajectory around Earth towards the Moon as it tested new technologies, including solar electric propulsion. It orbited the Moon from 15 November 2004 until 3 September 2006, providing a comprehensive inventory of key chemical elements in the lunar surface and taking thousands of images.
The Moon has provided the focus of many missions subsequently, but it did not receive human visitors since 1972. ESA and international partners are now looking forward to the next era of human exploration, and to better understand the resources available on the Moon to support human missions longer-term. While Apollo 11 touched down for the first time on the near side of the Moon 50 years ago, it is time to explore the far side, examine different types of lunar rocks there to probe deeper into the Moon’s geological history and to find resources like water-ice that are thought to be locked up in permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s south pole.
Credits: ESA/Space-X,CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station farewelled over 2000 kg of scientific experiments and hardware on Sunday 23 January as a cargo Dragon spacecraft began its return to Earth.
ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer captured the resupply vehicle in all its glory as it departed the orbital outpost at 15:40 GMT/16:40 CET. It splashed down approximately 29 hours later off the coast of Florida, USA.
The SpaceX spacecraft arrived at the Space Station just before Christmas, bringing new experiments alongside Christmas treats. It returned with a bellyful of science, including several European experiments that were quickly transported to NASA’s Space Station Processing Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and other items that flew with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet during his Alpha mission.
Among the experiments were an investigation into the effect of microgravity on resting muscle tone known as Myotones, cell cultures for the Cytoskeleton experiment that looks at how human cells behave in weightlessness, and a new device called Thermo-Mini for continually monitoring core body temperature that you might have seen Matthias sporting on Station.
It also transported cargo relating to Microage, which uses synthetic muscle cells to study muscle degradation aboard the International Space Station, the Blob educational experiment that saw students replicate space research in the classroom using a naturally occurring slime mould, and equipment for the Multiscale Boiling experiment Rubi.
The next resupply vehicle to fly to the Station is a Northrop Grumman Cygnus, expected to be launched no earlier than 19 February 2022. In the meantime, the astronauts of Expedition 66 continue their busy schedule of science and operations in orbit. See Matthias Maurer’s Cosmic Kiss mission page for the latest news.
Credits: ESA/NASA-M.Maurer; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Space Science image of the week:
ESA’s Euclid mission, to be launched in 2020, is set to provide a unique window into the evolution of our 13.8 billion year-old Universe. It will map the history of the Universe’s structure by studying billions of galaxies. In this way, it will be able to probe the nature of invisible dark matter, which makes itself known by the forces it exerts on ordinary matter, and the mysterious dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
In order to prepare for the huge and complex outpouring of measurements, teams of Euclid scientists have created the largest simulated galaxy catalogue ever produced, the Euclid Flagship mock galaxy catalogue.
It is based on a record-setting supercomputer simulation of two trillion dark matter particles, and contains more than two billion galaxies distributed over the 3D space that Euclid will survey.
The simulation reproduces with exquisite precision the emergence of the large-scale structure of the Universe – galaxies and galaxy clusters within the wispy network of the cosmic web that comprises both dark and ‘normal’ matter.
The simulation also mimics the complex properties that real sources display, such as their shapes, colours and luminosities, as well as the ‘gravitational lensing’ distortions that affect the light emitted by distant galaxies as it travels to us.
An excerpt of the simulation is shown in this image, spanning from today’s local Universe (left) back to when it was about 3 billion years old (right), when clusters of galaxies were beginning to form.
Zooming in provides finer and finer detail. Central galaxies, which populate the centre of dark matter ‘halos’, are coloured green. Satellite galaxies, which reside in the most massive halos in the highest density peaks of the underlying dark matter, are indicated in red.
Armed with this new virtual universe, scientists will be able to best prepare for the mission and also eventually assess its performance. Moreover, it will be an essential tool to develop the data processing and the science analysis software needed for such a data-heavy mission.
The release of the simulated galaxy catalogue was announced by the Euclid Consortium on 7 June.
The simulation was developed on the Piz Daint supercomputer, hosted by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, by a team of scientists at the University of Zurich led by Joachim Stadel. The teams that built the resulting catalogue are based at Institut de Ciències de L’Espai (ICE, IEEC-CSIC) and Port d’Informació Científica (PIC) in Barcelona, in collaboration with the Cosmological Simulations Working Group led by Pablo Fosalba (ICE, IEEC-CSIC) and Romain Teyssier (University of Zurich).
Credit: J. Carretero (PIC), P. Tallada (PIC), S. Serrano (ICE) and the Euclid Consortium Cosmological Simulations SWG
This colour-coded topographic image of Utopia Planitia was created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on 12 July 2021. It is based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. Lower parts of the surface are shown in blues and purples, while higher altitude regions show up in whites and reds, as indicated on the scale to the top right.
North is to the right. The ground resolution is approximately 19 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 83°E/43°N.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA test facilities can test more than just space hardware: here, the 2.0m-diameter nose of an Airbus A340 aircraft is seen in ESA’s Hertz chamber, undergoing radio-frequency testing.
“We had a rare gap in our test schedule and were able to accommodate a commercial customer,” explains ESA antenna engineer Eric Van Der Houwen.
“SPECTO Aerospace works on repairing damaged structural aircraft parts like radomes – radar domes – found on the noses of aircraft, which protect forward-looking weather radar and other equipment. But before any repaired radome can be returned to flight it needs radio frequency testing to confirm the repair has been a success and the structure is performing acceptably.”
A radome can be damaged in various ways, including lightning strikes, bird strikes or due to hail erosion. The repair process needs to return the radome – an aramid fibre honeycomb composite sandwich structure – to be high mechanically stiff and aerodynamically smooth – while also ensuring its desired radio-frequency (RF) performance remains intact.
“Sometimes a repaired radome can look good but might not perform so well in RF terms,” adds Eric. “It might be that the radome structure is absorbing too much RF energy, or triggering signal reflections or interactions that alter the shape of what should be a forward-looking signal. In this particular case, this radome requires a ‘side lobe level test’ – checking its sideways emissions.
“So we first of all measure the antenna pattern and energy level without the radome and then with the radome to see how much these values change. Finally we again test the antenna without the radome, to make sure our results match on a reliable basis.”
Part of ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands, the metal-walled ‘Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone’ chamber is shut off from all external influences. Its internal walls are studded with radio-absorbing ‘anechoic’ foam pyramids, allowing radio-frequency testing without any distorting reflections.
The Hertz chamber carried out a rapid test campaign for the company, with the nose cone – which fits onto both Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft – into and out of ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands in a single day.
“ESA is one of our reliable partners for specific aircraft parts testing,” remarks Jeroen Mast, managing director of SPECTO. “Our in-house test facility is able to perform the standard transmission efficiency tests for aircraft radomes, with ESA’s anechoic test facilities offering a valuable add-on to our services.”
ESA’s test facilities at the service of all Agency missions and Member States are supported through ESA’s Basic Activities. At the Space19+ Council of Ministers in Seville, Spain on 27-28 November, ESA will press for an increase in Basic Activities to maintain and develop its test facilities and general infrastructure.
Credits: ESA-P. de Maagt
The upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket which will launch the James Webb Space Telescope later this year, is on its way to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
Webb will be the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. As part of an international collaboration agreement, ESA is providing the telescope’s launch service using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace.
Overnight on 17 August 2021, Ariane 5’s upper stage was transported in its container from ArianeGroup in Bremen to Neustadt port in Germany. Here it will board the MN Toucan vessel alongside other Ariane 5 elements to continue its journey to Kourou, French Guiana.
The upper stage of Ariane 5 is manufactured by ArianeGroup, the prime contractor for the development and construction of the European family of Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 launch vehicles.
Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
Find out more about Webb in ESA’s launch kit.
Credits: ArianeGroup
Space Science image of the week:
Residents of Earth’s northern hemisphere enjoyed the greatest number of daylight hours in a single day all year on 21 June 2017. This summer solstice occurs when the tilt of Earth’s axis is most inclined towards the Sun, which sits directly over the Tropic of Cancer.
The ESA/NASA SOHO solar observatory provided an alternative view. It has been staring at the Sun since 1995, studying its interior, monitoring its surface and stormy atmosphere, and how the ‘solar wind’ blows through the Solar System.
The montage of images shows SOHO’s view of the Sun at different ultraviolet wavelengths in the early morning of 21 June, corresponding to solar material at a range of temperatures.
From left to right, the brightest material in each image corresponds to temperatures of 60 000–80 000ºC, 1 million, 1.5 million and 2 million degrees respectively. The higher the temperature, the higher you are looking in the solar atmosphere. The hottest areas appear brighter, while the darker regions are relatively cooler.
Back on Earth, the Sun is now beginning to trace a lower path through the sky each day. Winter solstice occurs in six months’ time, 21 December, when Earth’s axis is tilted furthest away from the Sun. With the Sun directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, this results in the shortest number of daylight hours in the northern hemisphere. The situation is reversed for the southern hemisphere, where 21 June marks the winter solstice, and 21 December the summer solstice.
Remember: never look directly at the Sun!
For more information about SOHO, including realtime images of the Sun, visit: soho.nascom.nasa.gov
Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA)
An unprecedented amount of fires have broken out in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. In this image, captured on 21 August 2019, the fires and plumes of smoke can clearly be seen.
Read full story: Fires ravage the Amazon
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Have you ever considered yourself capable of manipulating gravity? When you grip an object, you are doing just that.
Gravity is constantly exerting its force on objects, most notably by keeping everything weighed down. But when you lift a cup to your mouth, you are playing against gravity.
Despite gravity being a force of nature, living with it does not come naturally to humans; we learn how to work with gravity in infancy when we pick up objects and learn to adjust our grip to its weight and gravitational force.
How our brains learn this process is at the core of the Grip experiment, being performed in this image by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst on the International Space Station on his current Horizons mission.
In the weightless environment of the Station astronauts are like infants learning to adjust to the world in which they find themselves.
In microgravity, objects have no weight, which is an important indicator to our brain of how much grip force to apply to an object when moving it up or down. Furthermore, the inner ear no longer tells us which way is up. Naturally, our brains are a little thrown off and our coordination is disturbed. Researchers from the Institute of Neuroscience in Brussels are studying how long it takes our brains to adjust to this dynamic.
How does the experiment work? Alexander performs a series of movements while gripping a purpose-built sensor that measures grip-forces, moisture and acceleration, and more to assess how the body adapts to situations in which there is no up or down.
Alexander will carry out three sessions of the experiment during his mission. As with most experiments flown on the Space Station, the data will be compared to preflight and postflight sessions.
The Grip experiment has flown on 20 parabolic flight campaigns. Results indicate that short-term exposure to microgravity induces subtle changes in how the forces used in gripping an object are coordinated. Our brains anticipate the effects of gravity even when it is not there. On the Space Station, researchers can now observe the long-term effects. The experiment was first commissioned by ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet during his mission in 2016.
These experiments are designed to help us better understand human physiology and disease diagnosis on Earth. They are also helpful to engineers designing prosthetic limbs on Earth and will be used to help design robot-human interfaces so astronauts can command robots on other planets, allowing us to further explore our Solar System.
Learn more about Grip in this video produced by Principle Investigator Jean-Louis Thonnard and his team.
Follow Alexander during his Horizons mission via alexandergerst.esa.int and his blog.
Credits: ESA/NASA
This image from ESA’s Mars Express highlights the region of Terra Sirenum in the southern hemisphere of Mars, within which craters and valleys mark the surface of the Red Planet.
The region inside the bold white box contains the area imaged by Mars Express on 5 April 2022 during orbit 23067. The map indicates that the HRSC image is taken southeast of the Pickering crater, which measures around 110 km in diameter. It is an example of a crater which has been filled with lava.
Credit:
NASA/MGS/MOLA Science Team
A European antenna in Australia will soon be tracking a US mission currently preparing to land on Mars.
ESA’s New Norcia antenna is situated in the red and dusty desert of Western Australia, seen here under the twinkling lights of the Milky Way. From here, it will provide support to NASA’s InSight lander, which is scheduled to touch down on the similarly dry and dusty landscape of the Red Planet, at 20:00 UTC (21:00 CET) on Monday 26 November.
About 12 hours before the landing, and during the very last ‘Target Correction Manoeuvre’ before Insight enters the martian atmosphere to land, this 35-metre deep space antenna will make contact with the lander.
A crucial part of ESA’s Estrack network, the New Norcia antenna routinely supports ESA missions voyaging throughout the Solar System, including Mars Express, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), Gaia and BepiColombo.
ESA’s TGO will join with NASA orbiters to pick up data signals from InSight once it has landed, and relay these back to Earth, providing the first-ever routine data relay support between missions of different agencies at Mars.
You can watch the landing live on Monday from 19:00 UTC (20:00 CET), via NASA’s webcast.
Credits: ESA/D. O'Donnell, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Falcon 9 Crew Dragon spacecraft "Endurance" is being readied for the launch of Crew-3 now set for 3 November 2021 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It is the first spaceflight for ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will be the 600th human to fly to space.
On Station, Matthias will become a long-duration crew member, spending around six months living and working in orbit. During this time, he will support more than 35 European experiments and numerous international experiments on board.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This false colour image of Moni crater shows spectacular colour contrasts, which are representative of compositional differences and are visible thanks to CaSSIS's colour filters, the camera on board the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Along the rim of the crater, dark blue basaltic sand caps the lighter, cyan bedrock exposures (possibly low-calcium pyroxene). The yellowish material present in and around the crater is the characteristic martian iron oxide dust, which in true colour would look slightly reddish. On the walls of the crater small gullies that trap basaltic sand can be seen.
Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Orion crew and service module stack for Artemis I was lifted out of the Final Assembly and Test (FAST) cell on Monday, November 11. The spacecraft has been stationed in the FAST cell since July 2019 for mating and closeout processing.
The service module and crew module were moved separately into the cell, stacked and connected together for the mission.
After lifting out of the cell, Orion will be attached to a tool called a verticator that rotates the stack from its vertical configuration to a horizontal configuration for transport to NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, USA, where it will undergo full environmental testing to certify the complete vehicle for flight.
Once the vehicle returns to NASA's Kennedy Space Centre it will return to the FAST cell for installation of final panels left off for environmental testing purposes and the service module’s four solar arrays.
Credits: NASA–Rad Sinyak
After its arrival in the final assembly building, on 1 April ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) was slowly lifted into the air then carefully lowered onto the top of the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it into space. Here we see technicians working atop the rocket, bolting down Juice’s launch vehicle adapter to keep it secure during launch.
All around the spacecraft and rocket are movable platforms that enable the operators to work efficiently. The whole process was performed under strict safety and cleanliness regulations to keep Juice in prime condition for launch on 13 April. The technicians wore bright yellow suits; these are used whenever hazardous operations are carried out, for example when a spacecraft is moved.
Following these steps Juice was encapsulated inside Ariane 5’s fairing, where it will remain during the launch. This took place on 4 April. Shortly after launch, the fairing will open up and Juice will separate from the rocket.
Juice is being prepared to launch from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. After an eight-year journey to Jupiter, the mission will make detailed observations of the gas giant and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – with a suite of instruments. The mission will characterise these moons as both planetary objects and possible habitats, explore Jupiter’s complex environment in depth, and study the wider Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giants across the Universe.
Credits: ESA - M. Pédoussaut
Deck the halls with space-based bubbles!
Here is a festive bauble you will not see on Earth: a bubble produced by the Multiscale Boiling experiment, known affectionately as Rubi.
In this image, electrostatic forces are pulling the bubble upwards and making it spherical, producing not only a cool image but also cool insights into the boiling process.
Understanding how boiling behaves in weightlessness is imperative because gravity plays an important role. Without gravity, boiling takes place in slow motion and produces larger bubbles. This has allowed scientists to observe and measure effects that are too fast and too small on Earth.
The experiment is also installed with an electrode to observe the effect of an electric field on the bubbles, enabling scientists to observe and quantify the effect of external forces.
“Boiling is an extremely efficient way of getting rid of excess heat. This research could therefore provide very valuable information for improving the thermal management systems in space as well as in terrestrial applications,” says ESA project scientist Daniele Mangini.
With this insight and more accurate calculations of the boiling process, products such as laptops can be improved and made more compact.
Built by Airbus for ESA and housed in the Fluid Science Laboratory in the Columbus module, Rubi was installed by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano in August 2019. Since then it has generated bubbles under controlled conditions using a special heater.
The bubble imaged above is a follow on to the highly successful experiment. Called Multiscale Boiling X, the science on-going over the holidays is looking further at how things keep cool.
In the meantime, stay warm and stay safe!
Credits: Technical University Darmstadt
The replica ExoMars rover – the Ground Test Model (GTM) – that will be used in the Rover Operations Control Centre to support mission training and operations during tests around the Mars Terrain Simulator in July 2021.
This image shows the rover reaching a small hill in the Mars Terrain Simulator.
Credits: Thales Alenia Space
The two spiral arms winding towards the bright centre might deceive you into thinking you are looking at a galaxy a bit like our Milky Way. But the object starring in this image is of a different nature: PK 329-02.2 is a ‘planetary nebula’ within our home galaxy.
Despite the name, this isn’t a planet either. Planetary nebula is a misnomer that came about because of how much nebulas resembled giant, gaseous planets when looked through a telescope in the 1700s. Rather, what we see in this image is the last breath of a dying star.
When stars like the Sun are nearing the end of their lives, they let go of their gaseous outermost layers. As these clouds of stellar material move away from the central star they can acquire irregular and complex shapes. This complexity is evident in the faint scattered gas you see at the centre of the image. But there is also beautiful symmetry in PK 329-02.2, as the two bright blue spiral arms perfectly align with the two stars at the centre of the nebula.
It may look like the spiral arms are connected, but it is the stars that are companions. They are part of a visual binary, though only the one at the upper right gave rise to the nebula. While the stars will continue to orbit each other for millions or billions of years, the nebula – and its spiral arms – will spread out from the centre and eventually fade away over the next few thousands of years.
This planetary nebula with spiral arms is also known as Menzel 2, after the US astronomer Donald Menzel who discovered it in the 1920s. It is located in Norma, a constellation in the Southern celestial hemisphere where you can also find Menzel 1 and 3, two ‘bipolar planetary nebulas’ (shaped like butterflies or hourglasses).
Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 captured this image, which was processed using green, blue, red and infrared filters. Astrophotography-enthusiast Serge Meunier entered a version of this image into the 2012 Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgement: Serge Meunier
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over two saline lakes in East Africa: the larger Lake Natron in northern Tanzania and the smaller Lake Magadi, just over the border in Kenya.
Lake Natron is around 60 km long and is fed mainly by the Ewaso Ng'iro River. Despite its dark colour in this image, Lake Natron is often bright red owing to the presence of microorganisms that feed on the salts of the water.
The saline waters make the lake inhospitable for many plants and animals, yet the surrounding salt water marshes are a surprising habitat for flamingos. In fact, the lake is home to the highest concentrations of lesser and greater flamingos in East Africa, where they feed on spirulina – a green algae with red pigments.
The extinct Gelai Volcano, standing at 2942 m tall, is visible southeast of the lake.
The pink-coloured waters of Lake Magadi can also be seen at the top of the image. The lake is over 30 km long and has a notably high salt content, and in some places the salt is up to 40 metres thick. The mineral trona can also be found in the lake’s waters. This mineral is collected and used for glass manufacturing, fabric dyeing and paper production.
Copernicus 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 inland water bodies to be closely monitored.
This image, which was captured on 3 February 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
Could dying stars hold the secret to looking younger? New evidence from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggests that white dwarfs could continue to burn hydrogen in the final stages of their lives, causing them to appear more youthful than they actually are. This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of star clusters.
The prevalent view of white dwarfs as inert, slowly cooling stars has been challenged by observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. An international group of astronomers have discovered the first evidence that white dwarfs can slow down their rate of ageing by burning hydrogen on their surface.
“We have found the first observational evidence that white dwarfs can still undergo stable thermonuclear activity,” explained Jianxing Chen of the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led this research. “This was quite a surprise, as it is at odds with what is commonly believed.”
White dwarfs are the slowly cooling stars which have cast off their outer layers during the last stages of their lives. They are common objects in the cosmos; roughly 98% of all the stars in the Universe will ultimately end up as white dwarfs, including our own Sun. Studying these cooling stages helps astronomers understand not only white dwarfs, but also their earlier stages as well.
To investigate the physics underpinning white dwarf evolution, astronomers compared cooling white dwarfs in two massive collections of stars: the globular clusters M3 and M13. These two clusters share many physical properties such as age and metallicity but the populations of stars which will eventually give rise to white dwarfs are different. In particular, the overall colour of stars at an evolutionary stage known as the Horizontal Branch are bluer in M13, indicating a population of hotter stars. This makes M3 and M13 together a perfect natural laboratory in which to test how different populations of white dwarfs cool.
“The superb quality of our Hubble observations provided us with a full view of the stellar populations of the two globular clusters,” continued Chen. “This allowed us to really contrast how stars evolve in M3 and M13.”
Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 the team observed M3 and M13 at near-ultraviolet wavelengths, allowing them to compare more than 700 white dwarfs in the two clusters. They found that M3 contains standard white dwarfs which are simply cooling stellar cores. M13, on the other hand, contains two populations of white dwarfs: standard white dwarfs and those which have managed to hold on to an outer envelope of hydrogen, allowing them to burn for longer and hence cool more slowly.
Comparing their results with computer simulations of stellar evolution in M13, the researchers were able to show that roughly 70% of the white dwarfs in M13 are burning hydrogen on their surfaces, slowing down the rate at which they are cooling.
This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of stars in the Milky Way. The evolution of white dwarfs has previously been modelled as a predictable cooling process. This relatively straightforward relationship between age and temperature has led astronomers to use the white dwarf cooling rate as a natural clock to determine the ages of star clusters, particularly globular and open clusters. However, white dwarfs burning hydrogen could cause these age estimates to be inaccurate by as much as 1 billion years.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, G. Piotto et al.; CC BY 4.0
These twin briefcase-sized nanosatellites will manoeuvre around each other, before performing an automated docking in orbit.
The RACE, Rendezvous Autonomous CubeSats Experiment, is ESA’s latest in-orbit demonstration CubeSat mission, presented at this week’s CubeSat Industry Days, taking place at ESA’s technical heart.
CubeSats are low-cost satellites built up from standardised 10-cm boxes, increasingly used to demonstrate promising new technologies and approaches in space, as well as for educational, scientific and commercial applications.
The RACE mission concept involves two ‘6-unit’ CubeSats that will fly together in close formation, proving the capability of nanosatellites to perform close-proximity operations. These will include rendezvous and docking on a cooperative basis, and the ability to perform a close flyby around uncooperative targets, such as derelict satellites.
RACE is being developed by a European consortium led by the GomSpace company, with GMV working on guidance, navigation and control systems, Almatech contributing the docking mechanism and Micos the CubeSats’ visual navigation camera. The mission is being funded through ESA’s Fly element of the General Support Technology Programme, readying new concepts for space and the market.
“RACE will act as an in-orbit testbed for advanced guidance, navigation and control software and autonomous system behaviour,” explains Roger Walker, overseeing ESA’s technology CubeSats programme. “And by making it possible to assemble larger structures in space in this way, these ambitious CubeSats could open up many novel types of missions in future.”
ESA’s fourth CubeSat Industry Days take place this week at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, with more than 260 participants from 25 European countries, representing some 152 companies.
“This event is focused on the current European state-of-the-art in this fast-expanding space sector and discussing key issues for future missions,” adds Roger. By popular demand these Industry Days have been expanded with an extra final day exploring CubeSat propulsion systems.
Credits: GomSpace
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst in front of the Soyuz MS-09 rocket at Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, that will launch him into space on his second mission to the International Space Station.
The Soyuz launcher delivers millions of horsepower to reach an orbital speed of 28 800 km/h. After the engines ignite, they will propel the crew 1640 km in less than 10 minutes – averaging a 50 km/h increase in speed every second.
Credits: ESA
A Falcon 9 Crew Dragon is prepared for the launch of Crew-2 on launch pad 39A on 19 April 2021 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.
French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet is returning to the International Space Station on his second spaceflight. Called ‘Alpha’the mission will see a European astronaut launch on a US spacecraft for the first time in over a decade. Thomas is flying alongside NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide on the Crew Dragon. Thomas will be the first ESA astronaut to fly on a vehicle other than the US Space Shuttle or Russian Soyuz.
The Crew-2 launch is scheduled for 22 April at 06:11 EDT/12:11 CEST.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja