The upper stage of Ariane 5 which will transport the James Webb Space Telescope in space, is now integrated with the Ariane 5 core stage inside the launch vehicle integration building at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

The upper stage arrived at the launch vehicle integration building on 11 November 2021 where it joined the Ariane 5 core stage and boosters. It was then hoisted high to awaiting engineers so that it could be integrated on top of the core stage.

The Ariane 5 upper stage is powered by the HM7B engine. It will contain 14.7 t of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant to deliver 6.6 t of thrust for 1000 seconds. After core stage separation, the upper stage will provide attitude control during the ascent and separation of Webb on its path to the Lagrange point.

The Vehicle Equipment Bay, ‘the brain’ of Ariane 5, which is integrated with the upper stage, autonomously controls the whole vehicle and transmits all key flight parameters to the ground station network.

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.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

These activities mark the beginning of a five-week campaign to prepare the Ariane 5 launch vehicle which runs in parallel with teams preparing Webb, which started three weeks earlier. Soon Webb will meet Ariane 5 and teams will unite for the final integration for launch.

Find out more about Webb in ESA’s launch kit.

Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG - S.Martin

The swirling spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week is NGC 3285B, which resides 137 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (The Water Snake). Hydra has the largest area of the 88 constellations that cover the entire sky in a celestial patchwork. It’s also the longest constellation, stretching 100 degrees across the sky. It would take nearly 200 full Moons, placed side by side, to reach from one side of the constellation to the other.

NGC 3285B is a member of the Hydra I cluster, one of the largest galaxy clusters in the nearby Universe. Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are bound to one another by gravity. The Hydra I cluster is anchored by two giant elliptical galaxies at its centre. Each of these galaxies is about 150,000 light-years across, making them about 50% larger than our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

NGC 3285B sits on the outskirts of its home cluster, far from the massive galaxies at the centre. This galaxy drew Hubble’s attention because it hosted a Type Ia supernova in 2023. Type Ia supernovae happen when a type of condensed stellar core called a white dwarf detonates, igniting a sudden burst of nuclear fusion that briefly shines about 5 billion times brighter than the Sun. The supernova, named SN 2023xqm, is visible here as a blue-ish dot on the left edge of the galaxy’s disc.

Hubble observed NGC 3285B as part of an observing programme that targeted 100 Type Ia supernovae. By viewing each of these supernovae in ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared light, researchers aim to disentangle the effects of distance and dust, both of which can make a supernova appear redder than it actually is. This programme will help refine cosmic distance measurements that rely on observations of Type Ia supernovae.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy with a disc made up of several swirling arms. Patchy blue clouds of gas are speckled over the disc, where stars are forming and lighting up the gas around them. The core of the galaxy is large and shines brightly gold, while the spiral arms are a paler and faint reddish colour. Neighbouring galaxies - from small, elongated spots to larger swirling spirals - can be seen across the black background.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz); CC BY 4.0

Quiet please, future International Space Station commander in training. ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti prepares for her upcoming mission to the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, USA.

Samantha is a member of Crew-4 and will launch with NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines to the Station from Florida, USA, on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2022.

This will be Samantha’s second mission in space after Futura in 2015 and she is expected to serve as Space Station commander for Expedition 68a, a first for her. Her experience will stand her in good stead as Europe’s first female in command of an International Space Station expedition.

Samantha said “I am humbled by my appointment to the position of commander and look forward to drawing on the experience I’ve gained in space and on Earth to lead a very capable team in orbit.”

She will be ESA’s fifth International Space Station commander and the fourth from ESA’s astronaut class of 2009.

Her nomination comes at a significant moment for European nationals of all genders, as ESA issues a rare call for new astronauts. The deadline for applications to ESA’s astronaut selection has just been extended to 18 June 2021, to accommodate the addition of Lithuania as an ESA Associate Member. For more information about ESA’s astronaut selection visit Your Way To Space.

In the meantime, Samantha will continue training with all International Space Station partners in a programme that includes Space Station refreshers, science briefings, and Crew-4 launch preparation.

Watch a replay of a recent chat between Samantha and ESA Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, David Parker, in which the pair answer some questions concerning her upcoming mission.

Credits: NASA-B.Stafford

Captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 21 August 2019, this image features a huge raft of pumice rock drifting in the Pacific Ocean. The pumice is believed to have come from an underwater volcano near Tonga, which erupted on 7 August. The volcanic debris is full of holes and gas that make the rock light enough to float up to the sea surface. Covering a total area of around 150 sq km, this massive gathering of floating rocks has turned the ocean surface from its usual twinkling blue to a dull grey that almost looks like land. The raft is drifting towards Australia, and while it may be causing some problems for sailors, it could bring benefits to the Great Barrier Reef. There are millions of pieces of rock and each is a potential vehicle that offers a ride to small marine organisms such as algae, snails, barnacles and corals. If the raft eventually reaches Australia, the hope is that these hitch-hiking organisms could help replenish the Great Barrier Reef, which has been damaged by rising seawater temperatures.

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

Ariane 5 launch vehicle for flight VA261 sits on the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Flight VA261 will carry to space two payloads – the German space agency DLR’s experimental communications satellite Heinrich Hertz and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b. The flight will be the 117th and final mission for Ariane 5, a series which began in 1996. Flight VA261 will lift off as soon as 5 July at 23:00 BST (6 July at 00:00 CEST), pending suitable conditions for launch.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

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

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Lake Balaton in western Hungary. With a surface area of around 600 sq km and a length of around 78 km, this freshwater lake is the largest in central Europe.

The lake is mainly fed by the Zala River at its western end. The lakewater flows out near the eastern end via an artificial channel called the Sió, which eventually feeds into the Danube River.

Originally five separate water bodies, the barriers between have been eroded away to create the lake it is today. Remnants of the dividing ridges can be seen in Balaton’s shape – with the Tihany Peninsula on the northern shore narrowing the width of the lake to approximately 1.5 km.

Lake Balaton’s striking emerald-green colour in this image is most likely due to its shallow waters and chemical composition. It is heavy in carbonates and sulphates, and there are also around 2000 species of algae that grow in its waters.

The lake supports a large population of plant and animal species. During migration and wintering sessions, the site is an important staging area for thousands of ducks and geese.

Owing to its pleasant climate and fresh water, the Lake Balaton area is a popular tourist destination. The mountainous northern region is known for its wine, while popular tourist towns lie on the flatter southern shore.

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, captured on 27 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

ESA's Living Planet Symposium – the largest Earth observation conference in the world – is being held on 13–17 May in Milan, Italy. Held every three years, these symposia draw thousands of scientists and data users from around the world to discuss their latest findings on how satellites are taking the pulse of our planet.

Over 4000 participants will gather at the largest congress centre in Europe: the MiCo Convention Centre. With its iconic architecture, this modern building has become a landmark. The event will not only see scientists present their latest findings on Earth’s environment and climate derived from satellite data, but will also focus on Earth observation’s role in building a sustainable future and a resilient society.

In this high-resolution image, captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 orbiting around 800 km above, the centre of Milan is clearly visible. The famous Milan Cathedral or Duomo di Milano with its surrounding square can be seen in the centre of the image. Taking six centuries to complete, it is one of the largest gothic cathedrals in the world.

Milan is the second biggest city in Italy and, like most large urban environments, it suffers from air pollution. While there is an effort to reduce the emission of pollutants, the city is also incorporating more vegetation into its development plans. This not only makes the environment more pleasant, but the plants also help soak up greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

The Bosco Verticale, or the Vertical Forest, for example, aims to inspire the need for urban biodiversity. The two tower blocks have plants and trees planted on its façade, and are located just north of the historical centre. The vegetation covering both towers is equivalent to 20 000 sq m of forest and home to a variety of birds and butterflies. This vegetation absorbs approximately 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

Another example of the city’s efforts to ‘go green’, is the Biblioteca degli Alberi, or Library of Trees, visible next to the Bosco Verticale. With its geometric design and irregular patches of land, the gardens are home to over 100 000 plants and trees, interlinked with pedestrian and bike paths.

But it doesn’t stop there, the local government aims to plant another three million trees by 2030.

This image, also featured on the Earth from Space video programme, was captured on 24 September 2018 by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. With its high-resolution optical camera, it can image up to 10 m ground resolution.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018), processed by ESA,CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission takes us over Lapland, the largest and northernmost region of Finland, just in time for Christmas.

Located within the Arctic Circle, Lapland, also called Sápmi by the Sami people, stretches across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and into the Kola Peninsula of Russia. It is bound by the Norwegian Sea on the west, the Barents Sea on the north, and the White Sea to the east.

Lapland during the winter months means snowfall, temperatures well below zero degrees and the Northern Lights, or the Aurora Borealis, lighting up the dark, night skies. Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, lies at the top of the image, and is considered the official hometown of Santa Claus.

In Rovaniemi, the Arctic Circle runs through Santa Claus Village, located eight kilometres north of the city centre. The Arctic Circle marks the southernmost latitude where the sun can stay continuously below or above the horizon for 24 hours – these phenomena are known as the Midnight Sun in the summer and the Polar Night in the winter.

This image combines three radar acquisitions from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission to show changes in land conditions over time. The first image from 28 February 2019 is associated with green, the second from 11 March is linked to red, and the third from 04 April depicts changes in blue.

The changes that took place over time in this image are largely seen in the bottom-left of the image, where sea ice in the Gulf of Bothnia has shifted substantially along the coast. The Gulf of Bothnia, the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea, is situated between Finland’s west coast and Sweden’s east coast. As it receives the water of so many rivers, including the Torne and Kemijoki rivers visible in the image, its salinity is extremely low, and ice cover is maintained for up to five months during the winter.

There are many small islands, making navigation in the gulf difficult. For this reason, vessels travelling in the gulf receive icebreaker assistance on their journey in the ice-covered waters, and follow the straight lines easing their navigation. Straight lines can be seen coming from the Port of Röyttä and the Port of Ajos.

As an advanced radar mission, Copernicus Sentinel-1 can image the surface of Earth through cloud and rain and regardless of whether it is day or night – making it an ideal mission to monitor areas often shrouded in darkness like the polar regions.

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

NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins performs the Grasp experiment in the Columbus module of the International Space Station ahead of the New Year. The experiment studies how the central nervous system, specifically hand-eye coordination, adapts to microgravity.

Grasp stands for Gravitational References for Sensimotor Performance and seeks to better understand how the central nervous system integrates information from different senses, such as sight, sound and touch, to coordinate hand movements and determine what role gravity plays.

How does the experiment work? Mike dons virtual reality (VR) gear that is coupled with a laptop and driven by an audio/graphics system. The VR headset simulates a series of tasks for the him, while a 3D motion tracker updates the display in real time in response to his hand, body and arm movements. Measurements are taken on ground and during spaceflight.

ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet was the first to use the VR gear to perform the experiment during his 2016 mission. ESA astronauts Alexander Gerst and Luca Parmitano followed suit during their respective missions. Watch a video of Alexander performing the experiment.

Researchers suspect that, on Earth, the brain uses gravity as a reference. When reaching for an object, the brain uses visual clues as well as how your shoulder muscles counteract the downward force of gravity to keep your arm straight to calculate the distance between your hand and the object.

However, the sensation of floating for months on end is something our brains did not have to deal with until last century. Seeing how they adapt to this environment offers valuable insight.

Spearheaded by researchers at French national space agency CNES, the study helps us identify the workings of the vestibular system that keeps our balance, and how it connects to the other sensory organs. In other words, Grasp investigates the physiology behind hand-eye coordination, shedding light on how to treat patients showing a loss of vestibular function on Earth.

For astronauts, the research will be useful during spacewalks, where coordination in weightlessness with few visual clues is vital.

Credits: ESA/NASA

ESA astronauts Samantha Cristoforetti (top right) poses with her fellow NEEMO 23 crew outside the Aquarius underwater habitat, located roughly 10 km off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations takes place more than 18 metres below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. For nine days, astronauts, engineers, and scientists live and work underwater, testing new technologies for space.

Samantha is commander of this year’s NEEMO expedition. Since 13 June, she and her fellow ‘aquanauts’ have been living and working underwater, venturing out of their habitat each day to explore their surroundings through underwater spacewalks.

During these ‘spacewalks’, they are testing prototypes for two ESA devices that will aid in lunar sampling and expedition activities in the future. Their feedback will help refine designs for eventual use during Moon missions.

Last month, Samantha and fellow ESA astronaut Tim Peake prepared for the mission at ESA’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility, one of four immersion tanks of its kind, where they made a wet dry-run, of sorts, to refine the procedures and technology.

The NBF at ESA’s astronaut centre in Cologne, Germany, is regularly used to train astronauts for spacewalks from the International Space Station, but – by finetuning the negative buoyancy of the astronauts and the equipment they use – it can also be used to simulate the partial gravity of the Moon.

Credits: K. Shreeves

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features the picturesque spiral galaxy NGC 4941, which lies about 67 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo (The Maiden). Because this galaxy is nearby, cosmically speaking, Hubble’s keen instruments are able to pick out exquisite details such as individual star clusters and filamentary clouds of gas and dust.

The data used to construct this image were collected as part of an observing programme that investigates the star formation and stellar feedback cycle in nearby galaxies. As stars form in dense, cold clumps of gas, they begin to influence their surroundings. Stars heat and stir up the gas clouds in which they are born through winds, starlight, and — eventually, for massive stars — by exploding as supernovae. These processes are collectively called stellar feedback, and they impact the rate at which a galaxy can form new stars.

As it turns out, stars aren’t the only entities providing feedback in NGC 4941. At the heart of this galaxy lies an active galactic nucleus: a supermassive black hole feasting on gas. As the black hole amasses gas from its surroundings, the gas swirls into a superheated disc that glows brightly at wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. Similar to stars — but on a much, much larger scale — active galactic nuclei shape their surroundings through winds, radiation, and powerful jets, altering not only star formation but also the evolution of the galaxy as a whole.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy seen at a diagonal angle. Its very centre is a bright white glowing orb, surrounded by an inner disc of golden light. This is wrapped in a broad outer disc that glows more dimly, with patchy, broken spiral arms swirling around it, filled with small blue and pink star clusters. Dark reddish threads of dust also spiral through the disc, with some strands reaching into the core.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker; CC BY 4.0

Overview of the ESA–NASA Mars Sample Return mission.

Bringing samples from Mars is the logical next step for robotic exploration and it will require multiple missions that will be more challenging and more advanced than any robotic missions before. Accomplishments in robotic exploration in recent years have increased confidence in success – multiple launches will be necessary to deliver samples from Mars.

ESA is working with NASA to explore mission concepts for an international Mars Sample Return campaign between 2020 and 2030.

Three launches will be necessary to accomplish landing, collecting, storing and finding samples and delivering them to Earth.

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission will explore the surface and rigorously document and store a set of samples in canisters in strategic areas to be retrieved later for flight to Earth.

Two subsequent missions are foreseen to achieve this next step.

A NASA launch will send the Sample Retrieval Lander mission to land a platform near the Mars 2020 site. From here, a small ESA rover – the Sample Fetch Rover – will head out to retrieve the cached samples.

Once it has collected them in what can be likened to an interplanetary treasure hunt, it will return to the lander platform and load them into a single large canister on the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV). This vehicle will perform the first liftoff from Mars and carry the container into Mars orbit.

ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter will be the next mission, timed to capture the basketball-size sample container orbiting Mars. The samples will be sealed in a biocontainment system to prevent contaminating Earth with unsterilised material before being moved into an Earth entry capsule.

The spacecraft will then return to Earth, where it will release the entry capsule for the samples to end up in a specialised handling facility.

ESA and NASA are exploring the concepts for these missions, with ESA assessing the Sample Fetch Rover and Earth Return Orbiter. These will provide input to ESA’s 2019 council at ministerial level, where approval will be sought for the missions.

Credits: ESA–K. Oldenburg

This image shows ESA’s next exoplanet mission, Plato, in the Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF). In this room, the noise of a rocket taking off is simulated. The large room measures 11 by 9 metres and is 16.4 metres high. One wall is equipped with multiple noise horns, that have a similar design as ordinary speakers. Nitrogen is shot through the horns and can produce noise up to 156 decibels. During tests, no one is allowed into the room that is surrounded by a 0.5-m-thick layer of concrete to keep the noise in. Plato passed its test with flying colours.

[Image description: Plato’s structural model sits inside the LEAF chamber in ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre. Plato is put on top of a structure of four wheels. The LEAF room is green and has one wall with huge white holes in the wall. These holes are noise horns that can produce up to 156 decibels. The satellite is surrounded by microphones on sticks to measure the acoustic environment.]

Credits: ESA/ G. Porter

The James Webb Space Telescope is unpacked inside a dedicated spacecraft preparation facility at Europe's Spaceport where it will be examined to ensure that it is undamaged from its voyage and in good working order.

Here, the telescope is set upright in vertical position.

Read more

Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG - P.Piron

The lives of newborn stars are tempestuous, as this image of the Herbig–Haro objects HH 1 and HH 2 from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts. Both objects are in the constellation Orion and lie around 1250 light-years from Earth. HH 1 is the luminous cloud above the bright star in the upper right of this image, and HH 2 is the cloud in the bottom left. While both Herbig–Haro objects are visible, the young star system responsible for their creation is lurking out of sight, swaddled in the thick clouds of dust at the centre of this image. However, an outflow of gas from one of these stars can be seen streaming out from the central dark cloud as a bright jet. Meanwhile, the bright star between that jet and the HH 1 cloud was once thought to be the source of these jets, but it is now known to be an unrelated double star that formed nearby.

Herbig–Haro objects are glowing clumps found around some newborn stars, and are created when jets of gas thrown outwards from these young stars collide with surrounding gas and dust at incredibly high speeds. In 2002 Hubble observations revealed that parts of HH 1 are moving at more than 400 kilometres per second!

This scene from a turbulent stellar nursery was captured with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 using 11 different filters at infrared, visible, and ultraviolet wavelengths. Each of these filters is sensitive to just a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and they allow astronomers to pinpoint interesting processes that emit light at specific wavelengths.

In the case of HH 1/2, two groups of astronomers requested Hubble observations for two different studies. The first delved into the structure and motion of the Herbig–Haro objects visible in this image, giving astronomers a better understanding of the physical processes occurring when outflows from young stars collide with surrounding gas and dust. The second study instead investigated the outflows themselves to lay the groundwork for future observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb, with its ability to peer past the clouds of dust enveloping young stars, will revolutionise the study of outflows from young stars.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Reipurth, B. Nisini; CC BY 4.0

With giant storms, powerful winds, aurorae, and extreme temperature and pressure conditions, Jupiter has a lot going on. Now, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the planet. Webb’s Jupiter observations will give scientists even more clues to Jupiter’s inner life.

In this wide-field view, Webb sees Jupiter with its faint rings, which are a million times fainter than the planet, and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea. The fuzzy spots in the lower background are likely galaxies “photobombing” this Jovian view.

This is a composite image from Webb’s NIRCam instrument (two filters) and was acquired on 27 July 2022.

For the annotated version click here.

For the closeup click here.

Credits: NASA, ESA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt

After months practicing with a ‘fake’ Juice spacecraft, teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, today got in touch with the real thing. For the first time, mission engineers connected to the Ariane 5 rocket and inside its fairing the Juice spacecraft, for a dress rehearsal of the all-important “network countdown”.

The dress rehearsal is the moment that ESA’s mission control brings together the various partners and elements of the mission for a final fully integrated test before launch. Today, Juice’s signals streamed into ESA’s Space Operations Centre via an umbilical connection that will be disconnected in the moments before liftoff, joined by mission partners Airbus and Arianespace.

It is during the network countdown that the Flight Operations Director Andrea Accomazzo performs the well-known ‘final Rollcall’, as he contacts various teams and positions around the globe who each declare – when things are going well – they are “GO” for launch.

The dress rehearsal is a live re-enactment of this countdown and every step has to go right to declare launch readiness, from setting up the connection to Juice on the launch pad to establishing ground station links across the globe and ensuring all mission control software and systems are up and running.

This rehearsal comes after months of simulations in the Main Control Room, in which teams fly a spacecraft simulator controlled by devious Simulations Officers in the room below. Their job is to think up all the ways that something can go wrong.

In this period the teams focussed predominantly on the critical moments after liftoff – the Launch and Early Orbit Phase. Among hundreds of errors, large and small, Juice’s 85 square metre solar arrays failed to deploy, the spacecraft was lost to Earth’s antennas on dozens of occasions and it entered emergency Safe Mode five times.

Now that simulations are complete and dozens of worrying scenarios have been worked through, it’s time to focus on a nominal launch.

“For the last time we have practiced critical operations for the complex Juice mission – and everything went perfectly to plan. Next time, we’ll be doing this for real”, explains Andrea Accomazzo, Flight Operations Director for the mission.

“After speaking to Juice for the first time, we’re ready and couldn’t be more excited for the decade-long conversation about to take place across deep space”.

Juice has now been installed in its Ariane 5 rocket, fuelled, and final checks are underway before it is rolled out to the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, for a scheduled launch on 13 April at 13:15 BST (14:15 CEST).

The mission, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, will make detailed observations of the giant gas planet and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – with a suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments.

Juice 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.

To make all this possible, teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Germany will perform back-to-back critical operations including four planetary flybys to get to Jupiter and 35 flybys of its icy moons.

Credits: ESA

The James Webb Space Telescope is unpacked inside a dedicated spacecraft preparation facility at Europe's Spaceport where it will be examined to ensure that it is undamaged from its voyage and in good working order.

Here, the telescope is set upright in vertical position.

Read more

Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG - P.Piron

Under the wing of the Antonov cargo plane that carried ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter from Amsterdam Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, to Kourou, French Guiana.

Credits: ESA–M.Cowan

The Ariane 5 launch vehicle which will launch the James Webb Space Telescope was moved to the final assembly building at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 29 November 2021.

Ariane 5 parts shipped from Europe to French Guiana, have been coming together inside the launch vehicle integration building.

The lower part of the Ariane 5 comprises the cryogenic main core stage (with the Vulcain main engine, oxygen and hydrogen tanks), two solid rocket boosters and the upper composite, including the cryogenic upper stage (with the HM7B engine, oxygen and hydrogen tanks), the vehicle equipment bay – the 'brain' of the launcher, and all supporting structures that will interface with Webb on its adaptor.

A launch table is used to transport the Ariane 5 vehicle between the launch vehicle integration building, the final assembly building and the launch pad.

Webb, now fuelled, will soon be integrated on Ariane 5’s upper stage and then encapsulated inside Ariane 5’s specially adapted fairing.

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.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Find out more about Webb in ESA’s launch kit and interactive brochure.

Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique Vidéo du CSG - P Baudon

'Swage' was the word of the day on Monday as ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano carried out the third spacewalk to service the cosmic ray hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02. Here Luca is suspended above Earth as he is moved to a he second worksite to swage, or join, the instrument’s tubes to a new pump system that will give it a new lease on life.

Riding on the International Space Station’s robotic arm, Luca soared to the cosmic ray detector’s worksite for nearly five hours of space plumbing.

Yesterday’s spacewalk was the most critical of four spacewalks planned to service the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer that has provided scientists with invaluable data on cosmic particles long after its original three-year mission. In 2017 the decision was made to service the instrument after all four cooling systems wore out.

Luca and NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan began by passing the cooling system to each other as they inched their way from the airlock to the Space Station’s robotic arm. Luca then attached himself to the arm and – aided by astronaut Jessica Meir who operated this from inside the Station – transported the system to the hard-to-reach worksite.

Luca rode the arm into position, seen in this image, and together with Drew screwed the new pump onto AMS. The system was powered on and Luca was moved to a different location by robotic arm for the swage operations. Luca did six swages before taking the robotic arm ride again to the underside of AMS for the last two and finish the job.

The spacewalk was a success, with Luca and Drew finishing their delicate and unprecedented work ahead of schedule. They returned to the Space Station airlock ending the spacewalk at six hours and two minutes. A fourth and last spacewalk for AMS is planned at a later date.

Credits: NASA

The James Webb Space Telescope is unpacked inside a dedicated spacecraft preparation facility at Europe's Spaceport where it will be examined to ensure that it is undamaged from its voyage and in good working order.

Here, the telescope is set upright in vertical position.

Read more

Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG - P.Piron

ESA’s ultra-precise deep-space navigation technique – Delta-DOR – tells us where spacecraft are, accurate to within a few hundred metres, even at a distance of 100 000 000 km.

In order to navigate a spacecraft around our Solar System we have to know how far away it is, how fast it is travelling and in what direction. Each of these steps are explained in this new infographic, "How not to lose a spacecraft".

Credits: ESA

ESA’s Large Diameter Centrifuge at the Agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands is seen running here at full speed. The 8-m diameter four-arm centrifuge gives researchers access to a range of hypergravity environments up to 20 times Earth’s gravity for weeks or months at a time.

The centrifuge rotates at up to 67 revs per minute, with its six gondolas placed at different points along its arms weighing in at 130 kg, and each capable of accommodating 80 kg of payload. Multiply those combined figures by 20 g and it adds up to an equivalent mass of 24 tonnes.

Based within a scifi-style white dome at ESTEC in Noordwijk, the centrifuge has been a place of pilgrimage for European researchers for more than a decade including student experimenters on regular Spin Your Thesis! campaigns.

The LDC is popular with life and physical science teams, as well as commercial experiments. Internal ESA teams use the centrifuge to see how spacecraft materials and components would respond to the violent accelerations involved in launching into space.

See what happens to an air and water balloon in hypergravity here.

A next-generation centrifuge has been proposed from an ESA Topical team study: measuring around 200 m in diameter, this “Human Hypergravity Habitat” would be big enough for people to live in a hypergravity environment for months on end.

Credits: ESA –A. Le Floc'h

Jakobshavn Glacier in west Greenland viewed by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 29 April 2019. In recent years, Greenland has been losing more ice through this glacier than from anywhere else on this huge ice sheet. Various types of satellite data have been used to understand and monitor the glacier’s flow over the last 20 years. This revealed that the glacier was flowing at its fastest and losing the most ice in 2012–13. In places, the main trunk of the glacier was deflating by 10 m a year as it adjusted dynamically to ice loss and melting. However, information from satellites such as ESA’s CryoSat and the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission show that between 2013 and 2017, the region drained by the glacier stopped shrinking in height and started to thicken. The overall effect is that Jakobshavn is now flowing more slowly, thickening, and advancing toward the ocean instead of retreating farther inland.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA

The Orion spacecraft with integrated European Service Module sit atop the Space Launch System, imaged at sunrise at historic Launchpad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA on 27 August.

The Flight Readiness Review has deemed the trio GO for launch, marking the dawn of a new era in space exploration.

The first in a series of missions that will return humans to the Moon, including taking the first European, Artemis I is scheduled for launch no earlier than Monday 29 August, at 14:33 CEST.

This mission will put NASA’s Orion spacecraft and ESA’s European Service Module to the test during a journey beyond the Moon and back. No crew will be on board Orion this time, and the spacecraft will be controlled by teams on Earth.

The crew module, however, won’t be empty. Two mannequins, named Helga and Zohar, will occupy the passenger seats. Their female-shaped plastic bodies are filled with over 5600 sensors each to measure the radiation load during their trip around the Moon. The specially trained woolly astronaut, Shaun the Sheep, has also been assigned a seat.

The spacecraft will enter lunar orbit using the Moon’s gravity to gain speed and propel itself almost half a million km from Earth – farther than any human-rated spacecraft has ever travelled.

The second Artemis mission will see four astronauts travel around the Moon on a flyby voyage around our natural satellite.

Mission duration depends on the launch date and even time. It will last between 20 to 40 days, depending on how many orbits of the Moon mission designers decide to make.

This flexibility in mission length is necessary to allow the mission to end as intended with a splashdown during daylight hours in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, USA.

Two more dates are available if a launch on 29 August is not possible. The Artemis Moon mission can also be launched on 2 September and 5 September. Check all the possible launch options on ESA’s Orion blog.

Orion is the only spacecraft capable of human spaceflight outside Earth orbit and high-speed reentry from the vicinity of the Moon. More than just a crew module, Orion includes the European Service Module (ESM), the powerhouse that fuels and propels Orion.

ESM provides for all astronauts’ basic needs, such as water, oxygen, nitrogen, temperature control, power and propulsion. Much like a train engine pulls passenger carriages and supplies power, the European Service Module will take the Orion capsule to its destination and back.

Watch launch coverage on ESA Web TV starting at 12:30 CEST here. Follow @esaspaceflight for updates and live Twitter coverage.

Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble’s field of view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, which is evidenced by the dashed pattern.

The asteroid appears as a curved trail as a result of parallax: Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth, and this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory. The uncharted asteroid is inside the asteroid belt in our Solar System, and hence is 10 trillion times closer to Hubble than the background galaxy.

Rather than being a nuisance, this type of data is useful to astronomers for doing a census of the asteroid population in our Solar System.

[Image description: This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158. The majestic galaxy has a pinwheel shape made up of bright blue stars wound around a yellow-white hub of central stars. The hub has a slash of stars across it, called a bar. The galaxy is tilted face-on to our view from Earth. A slightly S-shaped white line across the top is the Hubble image of an asteroid streaking across Hubble’s view. It looks dashed because the image is a combination of several exposures of the asteroid flying by like a race car.]

Read more

Credits: NASA, ESA, P. G. Martín (Autonomous University of Madrid), J. DePasquale (STScI). Acknowledgment: A. Filippenko (University of California, Berkeley); CC BY 4.0

The galaxy filling the frame in this NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month is NGC 2566, a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Puppis. In this image Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) puts the thick clouds of interstellar dust that suffuse NGC 2566 on display, as well as the galaxy’s compact, bright core.

At 76 million light-years away, NGC 2566 is considered a nearby galaxy, making it an excellent target for studying fine details like star clusters and gas clouds. The new Webb images of NGC 2566 were collected as part of an observing programme (#3707) dedicated to understanding the connections between stars, gas and dust in nearby star-forming galaxies. NGC 2566 is just one of the 55 galaxies in the local Universe examined by Webb for this programme.

To gain a full understanding of the star-formation process in nearby galaxies, astronomers will combine Webb data with observations from other telescopes. At the long-wavelength end of the electromagnetic spectrum, the 66 radio dishes of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) provide a detailed view of the cold, turbulent clouds where stars are born. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has also cast its gaze on NGC 2566, and a new Hubble image of this galaxy was released earlier this week. The Hubble data will help researchers take a census of the stars in nearby galaxies, especially the young stars that are bright at the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to which Hubble is sensitive. Together, the Webb, Hubble and ALMA data provide a rich view of the cold gas, warm dust and brilliant stars in NGC 2566.

The Webb data are part of a Treasury programme, which means that the data may help answer multiple important questions about our Universe. Treasury data are available for use by scientists and the public without a waiting period, amplifying the scientific impact and allowing exploration to begin immediately.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy, seen close-up. Its core is a round spot that glows intensely bright, crowned by eight long and spikes that extend across the galaxy, artefacts of the telescope’s structure. Its disc is an oval shape with edges made of very thick and cloudy arms of gas and dust, mostly blue but paler and brighter around patches of stars. Wisps of darker dust also fill the inner disc and swirl off the ends of the arms.]

Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy; CC BY 4.0

This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows a dried-up river valley on Mars named Nirgal Vallis. This oblique perspective view was generated using a digital terrain model and Mars Express data gathered on 16 November 2018 during Mars Express orbit 18818. The ground resolution is approximately 14 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 315°E/27°S. This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera. The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface.

Learn more.

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

This atmospheric image shows a galaxy named Messier 85, captured in all its delicate, hazy glory by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Messier 85 slants through the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair), and lies around 50 million light-years from Earth. It was first discovered by Charles Messier’s colleague Pierre Méchain in 1781, and is included in the Messier catalogue of celestial objects.

Messier 85 is intriguing — its properties lie somewhere between those of a lenticular and an elliptical galaxy, and it appears to be interacting with two of its neighbours: the beautiful spiral NGC 4394, located out of frame to the upper left, and the small elliptical MCG 3-32-38, located out of frame to the centre bottom.

The galaxy contains some 400 billion stars, most of which are very old. However, the central region hosts a population of relatively young stars of just a few billion years in age; these stars are thought to have formed in a late burst of star formation, likely triggered as Messier 85 merged with another galaxy over four billion years ago. Messier 85 has a further potentially strange quality. Almost every galaxy is thought to have a supermassive black hole at its centre, but from measurements of the velocities of stars in this galaxy, it is unclear whether Messier 85 contains such a black hole.

This image combines infrared, visible and ultraviolet observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. O'Connell; CC BY 4.0

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher is talking to ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer who is aboard the International Space Station during the Intermediate Ministerial Meeting (IMM21), where ESA’s Ministers in charge of space activities convened.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

The first complete upper stage of Europe’s new Ariane 6 launch vehicle was packed into a container at ArianeGroup in Bremen for its journey to the DLR German Aerospace Center in Lampoldshausen, Germany. Hot firing tests performed in near-vacuum conditions, mimicking the environment in space, will provide data to prove its readiness for flight.

Credits: ArianeGroup/ Frank T. Koch / Hill Media GmbH

This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows volcanoes, impact craters, tectonic faults, river channels and a lava sea.

This image comprises data gathered by ESA’s Mars Express using its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on 13 May and 2 June 2021. The colour image was created using data from the nadir channel, the field of view aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and the colour channels of the HRSC. The ground resolution is approximately 17 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 242°E/19°N. North is up.

Read more

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

Calabria, often referred to as the ‘boot’ of Italy, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Calabria is a region in southern Italy, famous for its irregular shape that stretches from north to south for around 250 km – separating the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west and the Ionian Sea to the east. The region covers an area of around 15 000 sq km (with over 740 km of coastline) of which agricultural land covers 49%.

Most of the region is mountainous or hilly with three mountain ranges present: Pollino (not visible), La Sila and Aspromonte.

La Sila is a vast mountainous plateau around 1200 m above sea level, stretching for nearly 2000 sq km along the central area of Calabria. The highest point is Botte Donato, which reaches around 1928 m. The Aspromonte massif forms the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula bordered by the sea on three sides. The highest peak is Montalto at 1955 m.

Calabria is separated from Sicily by the Strait of Messina, visible in the bottom-left, where the narrowest point between Capo Peloro in Sicily and Punta Pezzo in Calabria is only around 3.2 km.

Almost 2 million people reside in Calabria, with Reggio Calabria being the most populous city in the region (with an estimated population of around 200 000 people). The city lies on the ‘toe’ of the Italian Peninsula, on the slopes of the Aspromonte mountain range.

Calabria is known for its tourism, with its main attractions being the rugged cliffs and sandy beaches. Some of these main destinations include Tropea, Scilla, Lamezia Terme and Praia a Mare.

As well as providing detailed information about Earth’s vegetation, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission 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.

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

This titanium propellant tank, on show in the laboratory corridor of ESA’s technical heart, comes from Europe’s Vega launcher – one of four serving its AVUM upper stage.

The 30-m high four-stage Vega is Europe’s launcher for smaller satellites. Its topmost ‘Attitude Vernier Upper Module’ hosts Vega’s avionics ‘brain’, overseeing the overall flight of the launcher. Then, once it separates from the third stage, the reigniteable AVUM flies like a spacecraft in its own right to deploy its various payloads into their set orbits, achieving metre-scale precision.

ESA’s Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory, based at ESTEC in the Netherlands, played a trouble-shooting role ahead of the first Vega launch back in 2012, after one of these tanks failed to perform adequately during a ‘burst test’ – involving deliberately overpressurising it. Following forensic scrutiny the Lab team discovered that weld quality was the culprit.

They produced a full metallurgical analysis of the tank welds, and came up with new protocols to improve their microstructure – the improved tanks withstanding more than twice their intended operating pressures.

The sixteenth Vega flight is due later this month. Flight VV16 will carry an innovative ‘rideshare’ payload of multiple small satellites and CubeSats.

Credits: ESA–SJM Photography

The Copernicus Sentinel-3B satellite’s rocket upper stage being hoisted into the launch tower at the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia. The Copernicus Sentinel-3B satellite is scheduled for liftoff on 25 April 2018. Its identical twin, Sentinel-3A, has been in orbit since February 2016. The two-satellite constellation offers optimum global coverage and data delivery for Europe’s Copernicus environment programme.

Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja

There is no escaping the holidays, even in space.

Though the crew celebrate together on the International Space Station, it is still hard to be away from family during festive times. Astronauts are encouraged to bring along items to make their time more comfortable and homely.

One such item, the famous elf of the popular children’s book Elf on the Shelf, accompanied NASA astronaut Anne McClain to the International Space Station.

The popular tradition of Elf on the Shelf involves placing the elf in a different spot in the home every day in the lead up to Christmas.

In this image tweeted by Anne from her home for the next six months, the elf poses next to MELFI, the Minus Eighty Lab Freezer for ISS.

Built by ESA and transferred to NASA and JAXA, MELFI is a versatile storage freezer. The four compartments can be set at different temperatures ranging from −98 °C to +4 °C to preserve biological samples such as blood and urine that will be returned to Earth.

Building a freezer that can reach such cold temperatures while meeting other standards for operation on board the Space Station was not an easy feat. The facility must be reliable and easy to maintain, energy efficient, quiet, and have little effect on the Space Station’s microgravity environment.

A closed thermodynamic loop using nitrogen gas and a Brayton Machine rotating at over 90 000 revolutions per minute was selected to meet these requirements.

Nitrogen gas is an ideal cooling agent as it abundant, odourless, and nonreactive. In the closed system, nitrogen gas is compressed, cooled, and expanded through tubes surrounding the compartments. It exchanges heat with everything it comes into contact with, which accelerates the cooling.

But just how cold is −98 °C? According to Anne, “those are cold temperatures – colder than the North Pole.”

Watch this video of ESA astronaut Tim Peake working with the MELFI freezers during his Principia mission in 2016.

There are 3 MELFIs on the International Space Station that were launched in 2006, 2009 and 2010, so MELFI has been in operation on the Space station for 12 years now, surpassing its expected 10-year service life.

Although Anne will be spending her Christmas in space, three of her colleagues will have left the Space Station by then. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst, NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev are leaving the Station after six months to return to Earth. Watch their return here

Credits: ESA/NASA

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the largest planet-forming disc ever observed around a young star. It spans nearly 640 billion kilometers, roughly 40 times the diameter of our Solar System. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, the dark, dusty disk resembles a hamburger. Hubble reveals it to be unusually chaotic, with bright wisps of material extending far above and below the disk—more than seen in any similar circumstellar disk. Cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707, the system is located approximately 1,000 light-years from Earth. The discovery marks a new milestone for Hubble and offers fresh insight into planet formation in extreme environments across the galaxy.

[Image description: Near the center is an object that resembles an edge-on view of a hamburger. There is a diagonal dark strip (the meat patty) of dust, running from 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock, that obscures a central star. Curving away from either side of the dark strip are glowing white clouds (the buns) where dust is reflecting starlight. Bright blue finger-like wisps of material extend far above and below the dark center plane. A few dozen stars, some with four diffraction spikes, are scattered on the black background of space.]

Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI, K. Monsch (CfA). Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI); CC BY 4.0

The James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, at 13:20 CET on 25 December on its exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

Read more

ESA - S. Corvaja

Image of HD 70843, the star chosen as the first target for Cheops, ESA’s Characterising ExOPlanet Satellite. The star, located around 150 light years away in the constellation of Cancer, is visible at the centre of the image, surrounded by fainter stars in the background.

The peculiar shape of the stars in the image is a result of the deliberate defocusing of the Cheops optics, which spreads the light from each star over many pixels. This makes the measurements of the starlight more precise, as they are much less sensitive to small differences in the response of individual pixels in the CCD and to variations in the telescope pointing. The triangular appearance of the stars is a known effect of the three struts that support the telescope’s primary mirror.

The image covers about 1000 x 1000 pixels, with each pixel edge representing a tiny angle of about 0.0003 degrees on the sky, equivalent to less than one thousandth of the full Moon’s diameter. The inset in the lower right corner shows a region covering about 100 x 100 pixels, centred on the target star.

Launched on 18 December 2019, Cheops is ESA’s first mission dedicated to the study of exoplanets.

More about Cheops

Credits: ESA/Airbus/CHEOPS Mission Consortium

ESA's science missions have been exploring our planetary neighbourhood to tackle the big questions that help to put Earth in context, to understand a planet's interaction with its host star, and to search for habitable worlds. With more and more planets found in solar systems beyond ours, understanding our own cosmic neighbourhood has never been so important.

We have already sent spacecraft to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbours – Mars and Venus – to understand why they evolved so differently, with the upcoming ExoMars rover soon to drill below the Red Planet's surface to see if there is any evidence of past life preserved underground. In the next decade we’ll be unlocking the secrets of the innermost planet, Mercury, and sending a spacecraft to Jupiter and its ocean-bearing moons – both key to understanding Solar System evolution.

The successes of our earlier missions form part of ESA's science and technology legacy, feeding into the next generation of cosmic observers. Even missions that have completed their in-flight operations still yield new scientific discoveries decades after, thanks to their vast data archives available to researchers worldwide.

The graphic showcases the current state of ESA’s astronomy missions, including collaborative missions with partner agencies (e.g. the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope), upcoming missions of opportunity (e.g. the JAXA/NASA Xrism and the Chinese-led Einstein Probe) and concepts for future missions (e.g. the two candidate missions Spica and Theseus). For a complete breakdown of the various ‘class’ of missions, see our mission navigator.

This portfolio of past, present and future missions shows the importance of long-term planning to realise the missions that investigate fundamental science questions, and to ensure the continued development of innovative technology, inspiring new generations of European scientists and engineers. For example, the billion star surveyor Gaia, was conceived in the 1990s, stemming from the success of its predecessor Hipparcos. What do we want to observe in twenty or thirty years time?

In the graphic, date ranges refer to launch and completion of in-flight operations. For future missions the foreseen launch date is indicated (as of February 2019).

ESA also has a fleet of space science missions observing the Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. Discover them here.

More about ESA's Space Science missions

Credits: ESA

All galaxies are made up of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter, which are bound together by gravity. The Bullet Cluster is made up of two very massive collections of galaxies, known as galaxy clusters, that are themselves bound by gravity. This cluster is found in the Carina constellation 3.8 billion light-years from Earth.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the central region of the Bullet Cluster with its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). The scene contains two massive galaxy clusters that sit on either side of the large, light blue spiral galaxy at the center. Webb’s extremely precise images revealed many more distant galaxies and faint objects, allowing a research team to refine the amount of mass in the two galaxy clusters.

The team measured thousands of galaxies in Webb’s images to accurately “weigh” both the visible and invisible mass in these galaxy clusters. They also carefully mapped and measured the collective light emitted by stars that are no longer bound to individual galaxies — known as intracluster stars. The team confirmed that the intracluster light can be a reliable tracer of dark matter, even in a highly dynamic environment like the Bullet Cluster. If these stars are not bound to galaxies, but to the cluster’s dark matter, it might become easier to pin down more specifics about the invisible matter. The researchers’ new measurements significantly refine what we know about how mass is spread throughout the Bullet Cluster. The galaxy cluster on the left has an asymmetric, elongated area of mass along the left edge of the blue region, which is a clue pointing to previous mergers in that cluster.

This image spans roughly 6.3 million light-years across. It was created with Webb data captured on 20 January 2025 from proposal #4598 (PI: M. Bradac). Several filters were used to sample specific wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F090W, Cyan: F115W, Green: F150W, Yellow: F200W, Yellow: F277W, Orange: F356W, Red: F410M, Red: F444W

The results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Image description: Webb observation of the Bullet Cluster shows many overlapping objects, including foreground stars, galaxies in galaxy clusters, and distorted background galaxies behind the galaxy clusters, set against the black background of space.]

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Jee (Yonsei University, UC Davis), S. Cha (Yonsei University), K. Finner (Caltech/IPAC); CC BY 4.0

This Apollo 11 image is an Instagram photo before its time. Were the platform to have existed in 1969, the post may have looked a little something like this:

An exciting 13-minute landing, but Neil and I made it safely to the lunar surface. Tranquility Base as serene as her name. Too excited to sleep, we’re on the Moon for crying out loud! Let’s get to work. @nasa

#nofilter #Apollo11 #MoonLanding #TranquilityBase

Of course, this image took much longer to publish. Taken by Neil Armstrong using a Hasselblad EL Data camera, the image had to be literally downloaded to Earth in the Apollo spacecraft before the film could be developed, assessed and eventually widely circulated.

The image was snapped in the early hours of 21 July 1969, a few hours after Buzz and Neil safely touched down on the lunar surface. The 13-minute descent was tense: the lander was moving much faster than anticipated and unexpected alarms flashed from the module’s guidance computers.

But the duo made it, and the rest is history.

In this image provided by the Hasselblad Foundation, Buzz Aldrin is setting up a seismograph. The caption accompanying the Hasselblad company’s release of this image states that neither astronaut fell over in the preparation. However, Neil Armstrong got tangled in a cord but with Aldrin’s help was able to get loose.

More photos will be on display at the Hasselblad exhibition opening at Brunkebergstorg Square in Stockholm, Sweden, this weekend to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The exhibition is part of this year’s space-themed Stockholm Culture Festival.

On display are iconic images of the Moon and the lunar surface taken using Hasselblad cameras as well as less widely publicised photographs of the astronauts and camera technicians preparing for the missions.

Hasselblad cameras were a mainstay of the Apollo missions. The 500EL models were carried in the Command Module that orbited the Moon as well as the Eagle descent module. The 500EL Data Camera was the first to be used on the lunar surface and was specially modified for its purpose.

The camera featured a Reseau plate, a glass square engraved with crosses to form a grid that was fitted to the back of the camera. The carefully calibrated crosses were 10 mm apart and were exposed on to the film when an image was taken. The crosses helped determine distance between objects in the photos.

Reseau plates were a common technique in photography, albeit on larger cameras. Hasselblad technicians adapted the technique to a smaller format camera, bringing down the cost, a great achievement at the time.

The camera also sported a specially-designed Biogon f-5.6/60 mm Zeiss lens that provided high-quality photos with low-distortion.

To keep the camera’s internal temperature more stable in the extreme environment of the lunar surface, it was finished in silver along with the film magazines.

The camera and film magazines were also fitted with tether rings, attached to a cord, that allowed the astronauts to more easily move them in and out of the lunar module.

After two and half hours of work on the surface and a seven-hour rest back in the lunar module, Neil and Buzz lifted off the lunar surface to join Michael Collins in the Columbia command module to head back home.

ESA is joining the international space community in celebrating the 50th anniversary of humankind first setting foot on the Moon and paying tribute to the men and women who took part in this endeavour, some of whom went on to work in later NASA, ESA and international space programmes. Today, ESA and our partners are busy preparing to return humans to the surface of the Moon. During this week, we will focus on the different lunar missions being prepared by ESA and highlight of some fascinating European contributions to lunar exploration.

Credits: NASA

An image of Earth acquired by the ESA Young Professionals Satellite payload, YPSat, attached to the upper stage of the inaugural Ariane 6 rocket, launched on 9 July 2024. The YPSat project represents the culmination of about two and a half years of dedication and hard work core team of about 30 Young Professionals from various ESA Establishments, Directorates and disciplines. Sacrificing their spare time, they shouldered the entire responsibility of designing, building and testing the payload before finally witnessing its successful launch.

Learn more.

Credits: ESA-YPSat

The Orion spacecraft with integrated European Service Module sit atop the Space Launch System, imaged at sunrise at historic Launchpad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA on 27 August.

The Flight Readiness Review has deemed the trio GO for launch, marking the dawn of a new era in space exploration.

The first in a series of missions that will return humans to the Moon, including taking the first European, Artemis I is scheduled for launch no earlier than Monday 29 August, at 14:33 CEST.

This mission will put NASA’s Orion spacecraft and ESA’s European Service Module to the test during a journey beyond the Moon and back. No crew will be on board Orion this time, and the spacecraft will be controlled by teams on Earth.

The crew module, however, won’t be empty. Two mannequins, named Helga and Zohar, will occupy the passenger seats. Their female-shaped plastic bodies are filled with over 5600 sensors each to measure the radiation load during their trip around the Moon. The specially trained woolly astronaut, Shaun the Sheep, has also been assigned a seat.

The spacecraft will enter lunar orbit using the Moon’s gravity to gain speed and propel itself almost half a million km from Earth – farther than any human-rated spacecraft has ever travelled.

The second Artemis mission will see four astronauts travel around the Moon on a flyby voyage around our natural satellite.

Mission duration depends on the launch date and even time. It will last between 20 to 40 days, depending on how many orbits of the Moon mission designers decide to make.

This flexibility in mission length is necessary to allow the mission to end as intended with a splashdown during daylight hours in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, USA.

Two more dates are available if a launch on 29 August is not possible. The Artemis Moon mission can also be launched on 2 September and 5 September. Check all the possible launch options on ESA’s Orion blog.

Orion is the only spacecraft capable of human spaceflight outside Earth orbit and high-speed reentry from the vicinity of the Moon. More than just a crew module, Orion includes the European Service Module (ESM), the powerhouse that fuels and propels Orion.

ESM provides for all astronauts’ basic needs, such as water, oxygen, nitrogen, temperature control, power and propulsion. Much like a train engine pulls passenger carriages and supplies power, the European Service Module will take the Orion capsule to its destination and back.

Watch launch coverage on ESA Web TV starting at 12:30 CEST here. Follow @esaspaceflight for updates and live Twitter coverage.

Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja

Friday 30 September 2016 was a bitter-sweet day for space exploration: the incredible Rosetta spacecraft reached the end of its hugely successful mission, fittingly, by touching down on the surface of the comet it had been studying from orbit for the previous two years.

This image was captured by the spacecraft’s wide-angle OSIRIS camera during the final hour of the mission from an altitude of about 400 m above the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Its final resting place is not far from the top centre of the image; see also this breathtaking sequence of images covering the final hours of the mission.

Rosetta arrived at the comet on 6 August 2014 after a ten year journey through space, and deployed lander Philae to its surface on 12 November 2014. Rosetta continued to study the icy, dusty object from near and far as the comet reached its closest approach to the Sun in August 2015 and moved towards the outer Solar System again.

Conducting science until the very end, the descent gave Rosetta the opportunity to collect unique data on the comet’s gas, dust and plasma environment very close to its surface, as well as take very high-resolution images and temperature measurements.

While the mission operations have concluded, the science certainly continues. Intense activities also surround the preservation of Rosetta’s highest resolution and best calibrated data in ESA’s Planetary Science Archive, securing the mission’s legacy for future generations.

Last week marked another milestone as the final Science Working Team meeting was held at ESA’s technical facility in the Netherlands. It was the 52nd of such meetings, the first having been held in the late 1990s. The meeting closed out the formal aspect of the mission and archiving activities and enabled teams to reflect on their efforts over the last decades. In addition, several days were dedicated to the latest and ongoing science activities, which are delving deep into the cross-instrument analysis of the comet. A number of the topics discussed are also presented in a recently published special edition of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA – CC BY 4.0

Exhibit 0102.226 may look like just a rock, but this dark and patchy mass is actually a piece of Mars, ejected when an asteroid or comet struck the Red Planet and sent chunks flying towards Earth.

Having survived its journey through Earth’s atmosphere, this alien rock was discovered in the Sayh al Uhaymir region of Oman, in 2001.

The alien rock is at ESA’s ESTEC technology centre in the Netherlands, on loan from the Natural History Museum in Bern, Switzerland, to support the calibration campaign for the ExoMars 2020 mission.

In this photo, the martian fragment is captured alongside the Close-Up Imager, CLUPI. A camera system designed to acquire high-resolution, colour, close-up images, CLUPI will be one of many instruments onboard the ExoMars rover, due for launch in 2020.

Taking images at the tens of micrometres to centimetre scale, the camera will help scientists understand the environment in which martian rocks and materials formed.

Planetary Defence

Of the 60,000 or so meteorites that have been discovered on Earth, 124 have been identified as having a martian origin.

Just like Earth, Mars is vulnerable to space rocks that hurtle through the Solar System. Unlike Earth, its thin atmosphere means they often strike the surface intact. The Red Planet is also lacking in another vital area, with no inhabitants creating space agencies and methods of planetary defence!

Asteroids with the potential to strike Earth are being monitored by ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre, which coordinates observations of small bodies in the solar system – such as asteroids, comets and even minor planets – to evaluate and monitor the threat posed by any that could come near Earth.

ESA’s Planetary Defence Office conducts regular observation campaigns to look for risky space rocks, predicting their orbits, producing impact warnings when necessary and working towards mitigating the damage of, and even preventing altogether, an asteroid strike.

CLUPI was built by an industrial team led by TASiCH in Zürich/Switzerland. The Principal Investigator is Jean-Luc Josset, from the Space Exploration Institute, Neuchatel/Switzerland.

Credits: ESA

Despite the Corona crisis, flight controllers and ground controllers are still working in shifts in control centres around the world, 24 hours a day, to keep the International Space Station aloft. This image shows operators at the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, Germany. With rules in place to limit the spread of the Corona virus, critical staff continue their work to ensure the European laboratory circling our planet at 28 800 km/h runs smoothly, the three astronauts living in Earth orbit are safe, and science continues in orbit.

Even though this is a normal day in a control room, the operations engineers maintain more than three metres distance at all times to stay healthy. The layout of the Columbus Control Centre helps, as the consoles are spaced far apart or are in different rooms. In the foreground is the Columbus Flight Director of the integrated operations team with the German Aerospace Centre DLR, in front of him is a member of the STRATOS team, a Columbus Systems, Data Management and Communications Engineer.

Other control centres around Europe were also in action this week. A Eurocom at the European Astronaut Centre near Cologne, Germany, was online to talk to the astronauts and filter information from the other centres. The Belgian User Operations Centre in Brussels kept the space storm hunter ASIM outside Columbus and the Fluid Science Laboratory inside Columbus running smoothly. In Toulouse, France, CADMOS was on console for the Canadian Vascular Echo experiment that uses European hardware and in Madrid, Spain, the E-USOC operations centre operated ESA’s Transparent Alloys Experiment inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox.

Meanwhile DLR’s ground segment engineers work behind the scenes to ensure all networks and computers are problem-free.

The Columbus Control Centre is at a DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen. Its integrated team is the main centre of European International Space Station operations, working with centres around the world in USA, Russia, Canada and Japan that set the daily schedule for astronauts in orbit and keep all systems of the weightless research facility running 400 km above our heads.

Credits: ESA/DLR G. Zoeschinger

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Banks Peninsula on the South Island of New Zealand.

Banks Peninsula, visible in the bottom-right of the image, consists of two overlapping extinct volcanoes: the Lyttelton Volcano and the Akaroa Volcano. The peninsula was formed by several volcanic eruptions that took place around eight million years ago. The name of the peninsula comes from Sir Joseph Banks, a British biologist who sailed with Captain Cook.

Breaches in the crater walls led to the formation of two long, thin harbours: Lyttelton in the north and Akaroa in the south. The peninsula also has many other smaller bays and coves, giving it its unusual, cogwheel shape. Christchurch, the largest city on South Island, is visible immediately north of Banks Peninsula.

The jagged coastline heavily contrasts with the adjoining, flat Canterbury Plains. Extending around 80 km inland from the coast to the foothills of the Southern Alps, visible in the top-left of the image, the plains are a rich agricultural region known for wheat and barley, as well as wool and livestock.

The Rangitata, Rakaia and Waimakariri are the principal rivers visible in the image flowing southeast from the Southern Alps. The Rakaia river, visible in the centre of the image, is one of the largest braided rivers in New Zealand. The river travels for around 150 km before entering the Pacific Ocean. The turquoise colours visible in the ocean suggest the presence of sediment being carried into the ocean by river discharge, as well as algal blooms.

Between Rakaia river and the Banks Peninsula, lies Lake Ellesmere (Te Waihora). The lake is actually a shallow, coastal lagoon, with its emerald green colours most likely due to a high concentration of chlorophyll. The long stretch of land, visible in brown south of the lagoon, is the Kaitorete Spit and is a barrier that separates the lagoon from the Pacific Ocean.

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, captured on 4 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