The Ariane 6 core and upper stages will be integrated horizontally inside the launch vehicle assembly building and prepared for rollout to the launch zone. The building is 20 m tall, 112 m long and 41 m wide, some 1 km from the launch zone.

Horizontal integration lowers the cost of facilities and launcher integration while offering a higher level of flexibility and growth potential and allowing easier access to the whole rocket. Overall, the improved Ariane 6 approach to integration and operations will reduce the duration of a launch campaign from months to weeks.

Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja

Ariane 6 Vulcan Aft Bay (VUAB) Flight Model 1 upper stage elements at Arianespace's Le Mureaux in Paris, France on 7 June 2023.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

Installed on Friday in the International Space Station and sending down images by Monday. This picture shows one of the first images of foam formed inside the Fluid Science Laboratory in Europe’s space laboratory Columbus.

The Foam-Coarsening experiment, developed by Airbus for ESA, is set to be activated this month but this image shows that the liquids held in cells are already bubbling as planned.

The image will not be used by the scientists yet but is taken to allow the experiment operators at the Belgian User Operations Centre in Brussels, Belgium, to keep track of the experiment and set it up.

The foams come in self-contained cells and hold liquids that are shaken by pistons and analysed with laser optics and high-resolution cameras for the scientists on Earth. Researchers are keen to observe how foams behave in microgravity.

On Earth, the mixture of gas and liquid that makes up a foam quickly starts to change. Gravity pulls the liquid between the bubbles downwards, and small bubbles shrink while the larger ones tend to grow at the expense of others. As the liquid is drawn downwards due to gravity the bubbles lose their strength and rupture, collapsing back to a liquid state.

This is annoying for researchers as it limits the time they can study foams and interferes with their experiments. But in space foams are more stable as the liquid does not drain to the bottom in weightlessness.

ESA astronaut Frank De Winne performed the Foam-Stability experiment in 2009 by shaking liquid solutions and recording what happened next. The samples ranged from pure water to protein-based fluids, like the ones used for chocolate foams, and antifoaming agents.

After just ten seconds, the fluids stabilised more quickly and produced more foam than on Earth. Scientists discovered that it was possible to create super-stable foams in zero gravity.

Building on this extensive foam research, Foam-Coarsening will investigate foam behaviour at different liquid stages, particularly as it transitions from a solid- to liquid-like state.

The results from this research will not just apply to the foam in your morning cappuccino. Foams are used in a wide range of areas from food production to cleaning and sealing products, cosmetics and personal hygiene products, and even construction.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir installed the experiment in the Fluid Science Laboratory on 6 March after removing the Multiscale boiling experiment known as Rubi. The experiment is controlled and data collected by the Belgian User Operations Centre who processed this image on 9 March.

Credits: ESA

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) being fuelled inside the payload preparation facility at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its launch on an Ariane 5 on 13 April.

Juice will use this propellant to make critical course manoeuvres on its journey to and around the Jupiter system, and to go into orbit around Jupiter then its largest moon, Ganymede. Juice has a bi-propellant chemical propulsion system, using mono-methyl hydrazine (MMH) fuel and mixed oxides of nitrogen (MON) oxidiser. This results in a propellant that spontaneously ignites when the two come into contact with each other.

Fuelling any satellite is a particularly delicate operation requiring setup of the equipment and connections, fuelling, and then pressurisation. The propellants are extremely toxic so only a few specialists wearing protective Self-Contained Atmospheric Protective Ensemble, or ‘scape’ suits, remained in the dedicated hall for fuelling.

Juice is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. It will make detailed observations of gas giant Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. This ambitious mission will characterise these moons 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.

Find out more about Juice in ESA’s launch kit

Credits: 2023 ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE / Optique vidéo du CSG - JM GUILLON

Check our accessible text here.

The Moon is about one-quarter the size of Earth in diameter, but around 50 times smaller in volume.

Image description: Moon size compared to Earth. Moon has 3474 km in diameter, while the Earth is 12 756 km.

Credits: ESA

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron walk out from the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, ready for launch.

Known as “Crew-3” the four astronauts will be launched to the International Space Station from launchpad 39A, aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft “Endurance”, atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

Initially scheduled for 31 October, the launch of Crew-3 was delayed by weather and a minor crew medical issue. With a favourable forecast and the crew in good health, liftoff is now planned for 02:03 GMT/03:03 CET Thursday 11 November. This is the first spaceflight for Matthias, 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.

Visit the Cosmic Kiss mission page to learn more about Matthias’s mission.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s exquisite sensitivity and highly specialised instruments are revealing details into how one of Saturn’s moon’s feeds the water supply for the entire system of the ringed planet. Enceladus, a prime candidate in the search for life elsewhere in our Solar System, is a small moon about four percent the size of Earth. New images from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) have revealed a water vapour plume jetting from the south pole of Enceladus, extending out 40 times the size of the moon itself. The Integral Field Unit (IFU) aboard the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument also provided insights into how the water from Enceladus feeds the rest of its surrounding environment.

Enceladus orbits around Saturn in just 33 hours, and as it does it sprays water and leaves behind a torus — or ‘doughnut’ — of material in its wake. This torus is depicted in the top diagram in light blue.

Webb’s IFU is a combination of camera and spectrograph. During an IFU observation, the instrument captures an image of the field of view along with individual spectra of each pixel in the field of view. IFU observations allow astronomers to investigate how properties — composition in this case — vary from place to place over a region of space.

The unique sensitivity of Webb’s IFU allowed researchers to detect many spectral features characteristic of water originating from the embedding torus around Enceladus and the plume itself. This simultaneous collection of spectra from the plume and the torus has allowed researchers to better understand their strong relationship. In this spectrum, the white lines are the data from Webb, and the best-fit models for water emission are overlaid in different colours –purple for the plume, green for the area central to the moon itself, and red for the surrounding torus.

Webb’s NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

NIRSpec was built for the European Space Agency (ESA) by a consortium of European companies led by Airbus Defence and Space (ADS) with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center providing its detector and micro-shutter subsystems.

Read more

[Image description: The infographic shows a diagram of Saturn, Enceladus, and its torus at the top, the NIRCam image of Enceladus at the bottom left, and the spectra from the NIRSpec instrument at the bottom right.]

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, L. Hustak (STScI), G. Villanueva (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

Space Science Image of the Week: Around Anuket

Captured in this curious view are the Anuket region and its surroundings on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The image was taken by Rosetta’s navigation camera (NavCam) on 13 March 2016, from a distance of 17 km, and measures about 1.5 km across.

However, if we briefly suspend disbelief and set our imagination free, we might be tricked into recognising the profile of a face, with the forehead and eyebrows on the left, a nose pointing upwards and even the hint of a smile. This is an effect of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon whereby humans tend to identify familiar shapes in the vague patterns of random images.

In reality, the fictional face shows the rough landscape of Anuket, a region of rugged terrains on the small comet lobe and declining towards the large lobe, which is located beyond the lower-right corner of the image.

Read more about this image here.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet re-familiarises himself with the Grasp experiment at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. Thomas will continue running this experiment during his second mission on board the International Space Station.

Thomas commissioned the Grasp or Gravitational References for Sensimotor Performance experiment during his first mission to the Space Station, called Proxima, in 2017.

The experiment tests how the brain interprets visual cues without gravity. Using a VR headset, the subject must complete a series of tasks like catching a ball or pouring a glass of water. The astronaut subject is held in place by straps to avoid bumping into expensive or critical equipment while performing the experiment.

“It was a bit disconcerting,” Thomas noted of the first time he performed the experiment on the Space Station, “but very fun to be in the Space Station which is already out-of-this-world while also being in another (virtual) reality.”

Watch a timelapse of Thomas setting up and performing the experiment in weightlessness here.

Thomas will perform this experiment again during his second mission, called Alpha, scheduled for launch in spring 2021. Read more about mission Alpha and the first European to travel to the Space Station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon here.

Astronaut training is more than just space suit-ups and spacewalk simulations in a big pool. They must also become familiar with experiment hardware and laboratory equipment they will use while performing scientific experiments on board the International Space Station.

All astronauts from ESA and international partners who fly to the International Space Station spend time at ESA's Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, where ESA instructors train them in the operation of all major European hardware on board the International Space Station, including the Columbus laboratory.

Credits: ESA-D. Ham

A sideways spiral galaxy shines in today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week. Located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (The Maiden), NGC 4388 is a resident of the Virgo galaxy cluster. The Virgo cluster contains more than a thousand galaxies and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to the Milky Way.

NGC 4388 is tilted at an extreme angle relative to our point of view, giving us a nearly edge-on vantage point. This perspective reveals a curious feature that wasn’t visible in a previous Hubble image of this galaxy released in 2016: a plume of gas from the galaxy’s nucleus, here seen billowing out from the galaxy’s disc towards the lower-right corner of the image. But where did this outflow come from, and why does it glow?

The answer likely lies in vast stretches that separate the galaxies of the Virgo cluster. Though the space between the galaxies appears to be empty, this space is actually occupied by hot wisps of gas called the intracluster medium. As NGC 4388 journeys within the cluster, it plunges through the intracluster medium. The pressure from the hot intracluster gas whisks away the gas from within NGC 4388’s disc, causing it to trail behind as NGC 4388 moves.

The source of the energy that ionises this gas cloud and causes it to glow is more uncertain. Researchers suspect that some of the energy comes from the centre of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole has spun the gas around it into a superheated disc. The blazing radiation from this disc might ionise the gas closest to the galaxy, while shock waves might be responsible for ionising the filaments of gas farther out.

This image incorporates new data including several additional wavelengths of light to bring the ionised gas cloud into view. The data used to create this image come from several observing programmes that aim to illuminate galaxies with active black holes at their centres.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy seen nearly edge-on. Its disk is filled with red and blue lights from star-forming nebulae and clusters of hot stars, respectively, as well as thick dark clouds of dust that block the strong white light from its centre. A faint, glowing halo of gas surrounds the disc, fading into the black background. A bluish plume of gas also extends from the galaxy’s core to the lower-right of the image.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Veilleux, J. Wang, J. Greene; CC BY 4.0

A ritual in Concordia: throwing boiling water into the air.

Concordia research station in Antarctica is located on a plateau 3200 m above sea level. A place of extremes, temperatures can drop to –80°C in the winter, with a yearly average temperature of –50°C.

The station is a collaboration between the French Institut Polaire Français Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV) and Italian Programma Nazionale di Richerche Antartide (PNRA).

Credits: ESA/IPEV/PNRA–C. Possnig

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, being packed at Airbus Toulouse for transport to Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.

Juice is humanity’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. It will make detailed observations of gas giant Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. This ambitious mission will characterise these moons 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.

Juice launches on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in April 2023. It has an eight year cruise with flybys of Earth and Venus to slingshot it to Jupiter. It will make 35 flybys of the three large moons while orbiting Jupiter, before changing orbits to Ganymede.

Juice is a mission under ESA leadership with contributions from NASA, JAXA and the Israeli Space Agency. It is the first Large-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme.

Credits: ESA/M. Pédoussaut

Preparing the Eutelsat Quantum satellite for transport from the S5B facility to the Final Assembly Building (BAF) and the hoist onto the Ariane 5 launcher, at Europe's Space Port in Kourou, French Guyana on 21 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 - M. Pedoussaut

Roll-Out rom VIFF to Pad The US Atlas V 411 rocket with ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft inside rolled out ahead of launch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday 8 February 2020.

Solar Orbiter is an ESA-led space mission with strong NASA participation to study the Sun, its outer atmosphere and what drives the dynamic outflow of solar wind that affects Earth. The spacecraft will observe the Sun's atmosphere up close with high spatial resolution telescopes and compare these observations with measurements taken in the environment directly surrounding the spacecraft – together creating a detailed picture of how the Sun affects the space environment around Earth and further out in the Solar System.

Thanks to its unique — and difficult to achieve — orbit, Solar Orbiter will also provide the first-ever pictures of the Sun's polar regions, offering key insights into the poorly-understood magnetic environment there, which helps drive the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and its periodic outpouring of solar storms. Solar Orbiter relies on a combination of 10 instruments, built throughout Europe and in the US. The instruments, combining both remote-sensing observations and in situ measurements, were carefully chosen and designed so as to support and amplify each other’s observations, together providing the single, most comprehensive and integrated view of the Sun and its environment ever achieved.

More about Solar Orbiter

Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja

This new picture of the month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the gravitational lensing of the quasar known as RX J1131-1231, located roughly six billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater. It is considered one of the best lensed quasars discovered to date, as the foreground galaxy smears the image of the background quasar into a bright arc and creates four images of the object.

Gravitational lensing, first predicted by Einstein, offers a rare opportunity to study regions close to the black hole in distant quasars, by acting as a natural telescope and magnifying the light from these sources. All matter in the Universe warps the space around itself, with larger masses producing a stronger effect. Around very massive objects, such as galaxies, light that passes close by follows this warped space, appearing to bend away from its original path by a clearly visible amount. One of the consequences of gravitational lensing is that it can magnify distant astronomical objects, letting astronomers study objects that would otherwise be too faint or far away.

Measurements of the X-ray emission from quasars can provide an indication of how fast the central black hole is spinning and this gives researchers important clues about how black holes grow over time. For example, if a black hole grows primarily from collisions and mergers between galaxies, it should accumulate material in a stable disc, and the steady supply of new material from the disc should lead to a rapidly spinning black hole. On the other hand, if the black hole grew through many small accretion episodes, it would accumulate material from random directions. Observations have indicated that the black hole in this particular quasar is spinning at over half the speed of light, which suggests that this black hole has grown via mergers, rather than pulling material in from different directions.

This image was captured with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) as part of an observation programme to study dark matter. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the Universe's mass. Webb’s observations of quasars are allowing astronomers to probe the nature of dark matter at smaller scales than ever before.

[Image Description: A small image of a galaxy distorted by gravitational lensing into a dim ring. At the top of the ring are three very bright spots with diffraction spikes coming off them, right next to each other: these are copies of a single quasar in the lensed galaxy, duplicated by the gravitational lens. In the centre of the ring, the elliptical galaxy doing the lensing appears as a small blue dot. The background is black and empty.]

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

On Saturday 11 December, the James Webb Space Telescope was placed on top of the Ariane 5 rocket that will launch it to space from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

After its arrival in the final assembly building, Webb was lifted slowly about 40 m high and then carefully manoeuvred on top of Ariane 5, after which technicians bolted Webb’s launch vehicle adapter down to the rocket.

This whole process was performed under strict safety and cleanliness regulations, as it was one of the most delicate operations during the entire launch campaign for Webb.

A ‘shower curtain’ about 12 m high and 8 m in diameter was installed in between two platforms, to create a closed-off space around Webb to avoid any contamination.

The next step is to encapsulate Webb 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-Manuel Pedoussaut

With a fleet of astronomy missions observing the Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum – from microwaves to gamma rays – ESA has been at the forefront of astronomy for decades. These missions enable astronomers to tackle big questions such as the origin and evolution of our Universe, from its early beginnings to the stars and galaxies we observe today, and the fundamental laws that govern the cosmos.

As cosmic sources shine brightly in one or more portions of the spectrum, our missions have been probing a wide range of processes in the Universe – from plan-ets in our Solar System to exoplanets orbiting other stars; from the life cycle of stars to their motions through our Galaxy and beyond; from black holes and active galaxies all the way back to the relic radiation of the big bang.

The future of astronomy takes us into the realm of multimessenger astronomy, where observations across the electromagnetic spectrum are combined with the detection of gravitational waves, bringing the sound to the cosmic movies.

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 exploring the Solar System. Discover them here.

More about ESA's Space Science missions

Credits: ESA

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

Reminiscent of an artist’s pallet, this is the Emi Koussi volcano in northern Chad, imaged by the Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite.

Emi Koussi lies at the southeast end of the Tibesti Mountains. At almost 3500 m, this pyroclastic shield volcano rises high above the surrounding sandstone plains. It is not only the highest mountain in Chad, but also the highest in the Sahara. Calderas, or depressions, can be seen nestling in the cap of the volcano. These are a result of magma erupting quickly and the surface collapsing into the partially emptied magma chamber. Emi Koussi is extinct and it is not known when it last erupted.

The lack of vegetation allows wind and water to carve long grooves in the rock. These grooves can be 30 metres deep and several kilometres long.

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites carry innovative high-resolution multispectral cameras with 13 spectral bands. Processing the image here reveals differences in the minerals of the rock. For example, the green around the cone of the volcano is old lava, while sandstone in the surrounding area appear in reds and yellows.

This image, which was captured on 27 November 2017, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme/a>.

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

Roll-Out rom VIFF to Pad The US Atlas V 411 rocket with ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft inside rolled out ahead of launch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday 8 February 2020.

Solar Orbiter is an ESA-led space mission with strong NASA participation to study the Sun, its outer atmosphere and what drives the dynamic outflow of solar wind that affects Earth. The spacecraft will observe the Sun's atmosphere up close with high spatial resolution telescopes and compare these observations with measurements taken in the environment directly surrounding the spacecraft – together creating a detailed picture of how the Sun affects the space environment around Earth and further out in the Solar System.

Thanks to its unique — and difficult to achieve — orbit, Solar Orbiter will also provide the first-ever pictures of the Sun's polar regions, offering key insights into the poorly-understood magnetic environment there, which helps drive the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and its periodic outpouring of solar storms. Solar Orbiter relies on a combination of 10 instruments, built throughout Europe and in the US. The instruments, combining both remote-sensing observations and in situ measurements, were carefully chosen and designed so as to support and amplify each other’s observations, together providing the single, most comprehensive and integrated view of the Sun and its environment ever achieved.

More about Solar Orbiter

Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionised, captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI).

N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. N79 is typically regarded as a younger version of 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula), another of Webb’s recent targets. Research suggests that N79 has a star formation efficiency exceeding that of 30 Doradus by a factor of two over the past 500 000 years.

This particular image centres on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes, dubbed N79 South (S1 for short). The distinct ‘starburst’ pattern surrounding this bright object is a series of diffraction spikes. All telescopes which use a mirror to collect light, as Webb does, have this form of artifact which arises from the design of the telescope. In Webb's case, the six largest starburst spikes appear because of the hexagonal symmetry of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. Patterns like these are only noticeable around very bright, compact objects, where all the light comes from the same place. Most galaxies, even though they appear very small to our eyes, are darker and more spread out than a single star, and therefore do not show this pattern.

At the longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI, Webb’s view of N79 showcases the region’s glowing gas and dust. This is because mid-infrared light is able to reveal what is happening deeper inside the clouds (while shorter wavelengths of light would be absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula). Some still-embedded protostars also appear in this field.

Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as N79, and have a different chemical composition. Webb is now providing astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in N79 with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies in the early Universe.

These observations of N79 are part of a Webb programme that is studying the evolution of the circumstellar discs and envelopes of forming stars over a wide range in mass and at different evolutionary stages. Webb’s sensitivity will enable scientists to detect for the first time the planet-forming dust discs around stars of similar mass to that of our Sun at the distance of the LMC.

This image includes 7.7-micron light shown in blue, 10 microns in cyan, 15 microns in yellow, and 21 microns in red (770W, 1000W, 1500W, and 2100W filters, respectively).

[Image description: A bright young star within a colourful nebula. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. A number of other bright spots can also be seen in the clouds, which are shown in great detail as layers of colourful wisps.]

Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner

The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission takes us over Mexico City. This huge, densely-populated capital can be seen in the top right of the image. It is home to almost nine million people, with the Greater Mexico City area recording a population of over 21 million. This makes it the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world.

This striking image has been created using three Copernicus Sentinel-1 acquisitions from 28 July, 27 August and 26 September 2018, overlaid in red, green and blue, respectively. Where we see explosions of colour, changes have occurred between the different acquisitions.

In the left of the image, three bodies of water are shown in black: Villa Victoria, Valle de Bravo, and Tepetitlán. Water is significant to the development of Mexico City, which is thought to have been built over a lake by the Aztecs around 1325.

Today, the city finds itself in a precarious situation in terms of water supply in spite of the regular flash floods and heavy rainfall it experiences during the wet season from June and September.

In the top right, we can see the round structure of El Caracol meaning ‘the snail’ in Spanish. Currently used as a reservoir for industrial facilities within Mexico City, there are plans for this to become a wastewater treatment plant. A 62 km-long sewer tunnel is also due to begin operating this year.

The Cumbres del Ajusco national park is shown to the southwest of the capital, in an area of the image that shows colourful dots forming a circle. Famous for being up to almost 4000 m above sea level at its highest elevation, it is one of many national parks surrounding the capital.

Volcanoes are also dotted around this area. Popocatépetl, to the south east of Mexico City, last erupted in September 2018.

Sentinel-1 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring programme. The satellites each carry an advanced radar instrument to provide an all-weather, day-and-night supply of imagery of Earth’s surface.

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

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

The Vega-C Payload Assembly Composite (PAC) with LARES-2 has been rolled out to the Vega Launch Zone (ZLV) and hoisted onto the Vega-C launch Vehicle on 7 July 2022 at Europe's Space Port in Kourou, French Guiana.

On the wave of Vega’s success, Member States at the ESA Ministerial meeting in December 2014 agreed to develop the more powerful Vega-C to respond to an evolving market and to long-term institutional needs.

Vega-C increases performance from Vega’s current 1.5 t to about 2.2 t in a reference 700 km polar orbit, covering identified European institutional users’ mission needs, with no increase in launch service and operating costs.

The participating states in this development are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Credits: ESA-Manuel Pedoussaut

Southern Ukraine is featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. This image was processed in a way that included the near-infrared channel, which makes vegetation appear bright red.

Owing to Ukraine’s climate and arable land, agriculture plays a large role in the country’s economy. In this image, captured on 26 June 2019, a patchwork of agricultural fields dominate the landscape. Ukraine’s main grain crops are winter wheat, spring barley and corn.

Circular shapes in the image are an example of centre-pivot irrigation systems, where equipment rotates around a central pivot and crops are watered with sprinklers.

The bright red contrasts with the black waters of the Kakhovka Reservoir on the Dnieper River, visible at the top of the image. Canals are visible as thin, black lines cutting through the agricultural fields, and are mostly used for water supply and irrigation of the surrounding farmlands.

In the far left of the image, the oval-shaped Oleshky Sands is visible. Covering an area of around 160 sq km., this large expanse of sand is considered a small desert in Ukraine. The grassy plains that used to cover the area are said to have died off hundreds of years ago owing to sheep farming – initiating the area’s desertification.

In the bottom-right of the image, a colourful network of salty lagoons lie along the northern border of the Crimean Peninsula. These shallow, marshy inlets are known as Syvash (also Sivash or Sivaš). During summer months, the warmer marsh waters leave unpleasant odours – earning the region the nicknames ‘Putrid Sea’ and ‘Rotten Sea.’

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

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

The Crew Dragon capsule carrying ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron home from the International Space Station splashed down off the coast of Florida, USA, on Friday 6 May 2022 at 05:43 BST/06:43 CEST.

Its return marks the end of Crew-3’s almost six-month stay in orbit and the end of Matthias’s first mission, known as Cosmic Kiss.

Crew-3 undocked from the International Space Station in Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance at 06:20 BST/07:20 CEST Thursday 5 May.

When a Crew capsule splashes down, it is met by nearby ships with experts ready to bring it on board, open the hatch, and welcome the astronauts home. After initial medical checks, the crew is transported by helicopter to shore.

Now that his mission has come to an end, Matthias will return to ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, where he will participate in post-flight debriefings, provide samples for scientific evaluation and readapt to Earth’s gravity with the support of ESA experts.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

International Space Station commander Luca Parmitano and NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan work on the spacesuits they will wear during the fourth and final #SpacewalkForAMS scheduled for 25 January. During this spacewalk, the duo will finalise thermal repairs on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an astrophysics device searching for evidence of dark matter and antimatter on the International Space Station's Starboard-3 truss structure.

Credits: ESA/NASA

Though the bright, light-speckled foreground galaxy on the left is eye-catching, it is far from the most intriguing object in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. In the upper part of the frame, the light from distant galaxies has been smeared and twisted into odd shapes, arcs, and streaks. This phenomenon indicates the presence of a giant galaxy cluster, which is bending the light coming from the galaxies behind it with its monstrous gravitational influence.

This cluster, called SDSSJ0150+2725, lies some three billion light-years away and was first documented by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), hence its name. The SDSS uses a 2.5-metre optical telescope located at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to observe millions of objects and create detailed 3D maps of the Universe. This particular cluster was part of the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey (SGAS), which detected galaxy clusters with strong lensing properties; their gravity stretches and warps the light of more distant galaxies sitting behind them, creating weird and spectacular arcs such as those seen here.

The Hubble data on of SDSSJ0150+2725 were part of a study of star formation in brightest cluster galaxies (called BCGs), lying between approximately 2 and 6 billion light-years away. This study found the star formation rate in these galaxies to be low, which is consistent with models that suggest that most stars in such galaxies form very early on. These BCGs also emit strong radio signals thought to be from active galactic nuclei (AGN) at their centers, suggesting that the activity from both the AGN and any ongoing star formation is fuelled by cold gas found within the host galaxies.

Credits:

ESA/Hubble & NASA, CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

Houston, Texas, US, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission.

The two identical Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites carry radar instruments to image Earth’s surface. Images acquired with radar are interpreted by studying the intensity of the signal scattered back to the satellite – which is related to the roughness of the ground.

The colours of this week’s image come from the combination of two polarisations from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission, which have been converted into a single RGB image. Interpreting polarisation can help scientists analyse Earth’s surface.

In this composite image, captured on 21 June 2019, the city of Houston appears in shades of white and grey which contrasts with the yellow tones of the surrounding land and the dark blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

With a population of over two million and covering an area of over 1600 sq km, Houston is the state’s most populous city and the fourth largest city in the US.

Houston is dissected by a series of bayous passing. Buffalo Bayou can be seen cutting through Houston, before joining Galveston Bay visible at the bottom of the image. Galveston Bay is around 55 km long and around 30 km wide, making it the largest estuary in Texas. The shallow bay has an average depth of around 2 m, which is unusually shallow for its size.

The Port of Houston, which spreads across the northwest section of the bay, is one of the world’s largest ports, and many ships can be seen as multi coloured dots in the bottom-right of the image.

Houston is home to the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, which lies west of Galveston Bay. The centre acts as NASA’s lead centre for astronaut training as well as the International Space Station mission operations. It was identified as mission control or simply ‘Houston’ during the Apollo, Gemini and Space Shuttle flights.

The centre also collaborates with other international facilities in a variety of scientific and engineering programmes related to human space flight and planetary exploration. The Johnson Space Center is where many ESA astronauts are sent as part of their training and preparation for future space missions. This is where Luca Parmitano, who recently returned to Earth, trained for his Beyond mission to the International Space Station.

This image is also available in the Earth from Space video programme.

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

This image shows a network of dried-up valleys on Mars 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 18831. It covers a part of the martian surface centred at 66°E/17°S. North is to the right.

More information

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

This image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features R Aquarii, a symbiotic binary star that lies only roughly 1000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. This is a type of binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and a red giant that is surrounded by a large, dynamic nebula.

[Image description: A bright binary star surrounded by a nebula. The star, in the centre, is a large white spot surrounded by a circular glow. It has a large, X-shaped set of diffraction spikes around it. The nebula extends far above, below, left and right of the star in long, arcing shapes made of thin, multicoloured filaments – mostly red and greenish colours, but lit in a bright cyan near the star where its light illuminates the gas.]

Read more

Credits: NASA, ESA, M. Stute, M. Karovska, D. de Martin & M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble); CC BY 4.0

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst watching the 2018 FIFA World Cup football match between his home country Germany and Mexico on Sunday, 17 June. He posted this picture on social media after the game had finished, commenting: "To the German national team: The first game still counts as dress rehearsal! ;) Congratulations to Mexico, great match by both teams. Fingers crossed for the next game from the ISS!"

Alexander Gerst is currently on his second mission to the International Space Station for Expeditions 56 and 57. The mission is part of ESA’s vision to use Earth-orbiting spacecraft as a place to live and work for the benefit of European society while using the experience to prepare for future voyages of exploration further into the Solar System.

Connect with Alexander Gerst

Credits: ESA/NASA

This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image shows an area of Bolivia that was once covered by trees but has now been cleared for resettlement schemes and agriculture.

Click on the box in the lower-right corner to view this image at its full 10 m resolution directly in your browser.

Bolivia’s city of Santa Cruz can be seen at the mid-left. One of the fastest growing cities in the world, this important commercial centre lies on the Pirai River in the tropical lowlands of eastern Bolivia. To the east of the city, and particularly east of the Guapay River, or the Río Grande, a huge patchwork of agricultural fields can be seen. Back in the 1960s this was an area of largely inaccessible thick Amazon forest. However, as an area of relatively flat lowland with abundant rainfall, it is suited to farming.

As part of a drive to develop and improve the economy, there has been rapid deforestation since the 1980s to accommodate programmes to resettle people from the Andean high plains and develop the area for agriculture, particularly for soybean production. This has resulted in the region being transformed from dense forest into a large mosaic of fields. As well as countless rectangular fields, radial features can be seen where individual farmers have worked outwards from a central hub of communal land.

This image was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite on 30 September 2017, and processed in false colour.

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

On 5 January 2026, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot planted an American sweetgum tree at ESA's European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, to mark her first mission to space, εpsilon. This tradition celebrates her achievements and the connection between space explorers and Earth. Sophie was joined by Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s Director of Human and Robotic Exploration. Her mission to the International Space Station is scheduled to launch no earlier than 15 February 2026.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

ESA’s new Sun exploring spacecraft Solar Orbiter launched atop the US Atlas V 411 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 04:03 GMT (05:03 CET) on 10 February 2020. An ESA-led mission with strong NASA participation, Solar Orbiter will look at some of the never-before-seen regions of the Sun, such as the poles, and attempt to shed more light on the origins of solar wind, which can knock out power grids on the ground and disrupt operations of satellites orbiting the Earth. The spacecraft will take advantage of the gravitational pull of Venus to adjust its orbit to obtain unprecedented views of the solar surface.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

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

The fairing of the US Atlas V 411 rocket with ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft inside at the Astrotech payload processing facility near Kennedy Space Center in Florida during launch preparations on 21 January 2020.

Solar Orbiter is an ESA-led space mission with strong NASA participation to study the Sun, its outer atmosphere and what drives the dynamic outflow of solar wind that affects Earth. The spacecraft will observe the Sun's atmosphere up close with high spatial resolution telescopes and compare these observations with measurements taken in the environment directly surrounding the spacecraft – together creating a detailed picture of how the Sun affects the space environment around Earth and further out in the Solar System.

Thanks to its unique — and difficult to achieve — orbit, Solar Orbiter will also provide the first-ever pictures of the Sun's polar regions, offering key insights into the poorly-understood magnetic environment there, which helps drive the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and its periodic outpouring of solar storms. Solar Orbiter relies on a combination of 10 instruments, built throughout Europe and in the US. The instruments, combining both remote-sensing observations and in situ measurements, were carefully chosen and designed so as to support and amplify each other’s observations, together providing the single, most comprehensive and integrated view of the Sun and its environment ever achieved.

More about Solar Orbiter

Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja

This composite shows the total lunar eclipse of 8 September 2025 as seen from Concordia Station in Antarctica. Between 1:00 and 4:00 local time, the crew sequenced the Moon’s passage through Earth’s shadow, from bright silver to deep red and back again.

While around 85% of the world’s population had the chance to view this eclipse, Concordia offered a rare vantage point — perched on Dome C plateau at –80 °C, just a few weeks after the first sunrise since May.

Each year, ESA sponsors a medical doctor to live and work at Concordia through the long Antarctic winter. This year, Dr Nina Purvis from the United Kingdom has joined the DC21 crew – the 21st team to winterover at the station – to study how humans adapt to isolation, darkness and extreme cold. Her research will help prepare for future missions to the Moon and Mars.

Follow Nina’s updates and explore stories from past ESA-sponsored doctors on our Concordia blog.

Credits: DC21/ESA/IPEV/PNRA – J. Lacrampe

Acknowledgements: N. Purvis

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. This scene is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy situated about 160 000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies that orbit our galaxy.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to several massive stellar nurseries where gas clouds, like those strewn across this image, coalesce into new stars. Today’s image depicts a portion of the galaxy’s second-largest star-forming region, which is called N11. (The most massive and prolific star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula, is a frequent target for Hubble.) We see bright, young stars lighting up the gas clouds and sculpting clumps of dust with powerful ultraviolet radiation.

This image marries observations made roughly 20 years apart, a testament to Hubble’s longevity. The first set of observations, which were carried out in 2002–2003, capitalised on the exquisite sensitivity and resolution of the then-newly-installed Advanced Camera for Surveys. Astronomers turned Hubble toward the N11 star cluster to do something that had never been done before at the time: catalogue all the stars in a young cluster with masses between 10% of the Sun’s mass and 100 times the Sun’s mass.

The second set of observations came from Hubble’s newest camera, the Wide Field Camera 3. These images focused on the dusty clouds that suffuse the cluster, bringing a new perspective on cosmic dust.

[Image Description: Stars in a star cluster shine brightly blue, with four-pointed spikes radiating from them. The centre shows a small, crowded group of stars while a larger group lies out of view on the left. The nebula is mostly thick, smoky clouds of gas, lit up in blue tones by the stars. Clumps of dust hover before and around the stars; they are mostly dark, but lit around their edges where the starlight erodes them.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz; CC BY 4.0

Europe’s newest rocket, Ariane 6, took flight for the second time from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 13:24 local time on 6 March (16:24 GMT, 17:24 CET).

This was the first commercial flight for Ariane 6, flight VA263, delivering the CSO-3 satellite to orbit. Arianespace was the operator and launch service provider for the French Procurement agency (DGA) and France’s space agency CNES on behalf of the French Air and Space Force’s Space Command (CDE).

During this second launch, all phases were successfully executed, including the Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU) reignition, the Vinci engine’s third boost and deorbiting of the upper stage.

Ariane 6 is Europe’s heavy launcher and a key element of ESA’s efforts to ensure autonomous access to space for Europe’s citizens. Its modular and versatile design allows it to launch all missions from low-Earth orbit into deep space. For this launch, the rocket was used in its two-booster configuration.

Shortly after liftoff and booster separation, the upper stage separated from the core stage. The upper stage engine then fired for the first time, taking Ariane 6 into an elliptical orbit travelling 300 km at its closest to Earth, and 600 km at its farthest from Earth, achieving the ‘chill-down’ and first ignition of the Vinci engine and of the Auxiliary Propulsion Unit. After a ‘coasting’ phase lasting 37 minutes, the engine fired up for a second time.

After Vinci’s second boost, the rocket’s passenger, a French satellite called CSO-3, was injected into Sun-Synchronous Orbit at an altitude of around 800 km. Spacecraft separation occurred one hour and six minutes after liftoff.

After the successful delivery of CSO-3, Ariane 6 demonstrated the full potential of its upper stage. The Auxiliary Propulsion Unit ignited as expected, and the Vinci engine’s third boost put the upper stage into a reentry orbit to safely burn up through Earth’s atmosphere, preventing accumulation of space debris. This confirms the full capability of Ariane 6.

Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja

After a week of ground-based communications antennas, test vehicles and the like, here's some genuine space hardware with multiple flights to its credit.

This is the original Spartan flight instrument, which was carried into space five times in the Shuttle payload bay (you can see a badge depicting five Shuttle silhouettes attached to the vehicle) and deployed for the duration of each mission into a parallel orbit with Shuttle. The programme was created by NASA in the 1980s to replace its sub-orbital sounding rocket programme.

The scientific payloads for Spartan therefore were of the same order as those formerly carried aloft by Aerobees and other sounding rockets. This retrievable system as presently instrumented houses an ultra-violet coronagraph from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a white light coronagraph from the Goddard Space Flight Center. These devices use internal and external means of occulting the solar photosphere to reveal the structure of the sun's faint outer atmosphere. They and other similar instruments studied the solar corona on five separate occasions and played a part in numerous Shuttle exercises.

This particular configuration was reassembled by Swales, Inc., under NASA contract, for display at the Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003. It hangs from the ceiling in the Space Science section of the James S McDonnell Space Hangar.

The copper-coloured baffle cover of our Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, in the clean room at Airbus Defence and Space Spain, Madrid.

After completing spacecraft testing, the satellite has passed a very important review that determined it is ready to fly. Cheops will be stored in Madrid for a few months before being shipped to the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana; launch is scheduled in the time slot between 15 October and 14 November.

The baffle cover pictured in this image is designed to protect the satellite’s scientific instrument – a powerful camera, or photometer – during assembly and launch. Once in space, the cover will open, allowing light from stars to enter the telescope.

Cheops will make observations of exoplanet-hosting stars to measure small changes in their brightness due to the transit of a planet across the star's disc, targeting in particular stars hosting planets in the Earth-to-Neptune size range. The information will enable precise measurements of the sizes of the orbiting planets to be made: combined with measurements of the planet masses, this will provide an estimate of their mean density – a first step to characterising planets outside our Solar System.

Cheops paves the way for the next generation of ESA’s exoplanet satellites, with two further missions – Plato and Ariel– planned for the next decade to tackle different aspects of the evolving field of exoplanet science.

More information

Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja

This image shows part of the ice cap sitting at Mars’ north pole, complete with bright swathes of ice, dark troughs and depressions, and signs of strong winds and stormy activity.

The landscape here is a rippled mix of colour. Dark red and ochre-hued troughs appear to cut through the icy white of the polar cap; these form part of a wider system of depressions that spiral outwards from the very centre of the pole. Visible to the left of the frame are a few extended streams of clouds, aligned perpendicularly to a couple of the troughs. These are thought to be caused by small local storms that kick up dust into the martian atmosphere, eroding scarps and slopes as they do so and slowly changing the appearance of the troughs over time.

This image comprises data gathered on 16 November 2006 during orbit 3670. The ground resolution is approximately 15 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 244°E/85°N. This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. North is to the upper right.

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

Overview of the ExoMars programme timeline.

The ExoMars programme is a joint endeavour between Roscosmos State Corporation ESA. Apart from the 2022 mission, it includes the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) launched in 2016. The TGO is already both delivering important scientific results obtained by its own Russian and European science instruments and relaying data from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and InSight lander. The module will also relay the data from the ExoMars 2022 mission once it arrives at Mars.

Credits: ESA

ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, lifts off from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The Soyuz-Fregat launcher will also deliver the Italian space agency’s Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation satellite, and three CubeSats – including ESA’s OPS-SAT – into space on 18 December 2019.

Cheops is ESA’s first mission dedicated to the study of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. It will observe bright stars that are already known to host planets, measuring minuscule brightness changes due to the planet’s transit across the star’s disc.

More about Cheops

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

The striking spiral galaxy featured in this week’s Hubble Picture of the Week is Messier 90 (M90, also NGC 4569), located in the constellation Virgo. In 2019, an image of M90 was released using data from the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 — data taken in 1994 soon after the camera’s installation. That image has a distinctive stair-step pattern due to the layout of WFPC2’s sensors. WFPC2 was replaced in 2010 by the Wide Field Camera 3, and Hubble used WFC3 when it turned its aperture to Messier 90 again in 2019 and 2023. The resulting data was processed to create this stunning new image, providing a much fuller view of the galaxy’s dusty disc, its gaseous halo and its bright core.

The inner regions of M90’s disc are sites of star formation, which is highlighted here by red H-alpha light from nebulae, but this is absent in the rest of the galaxy. M90 sits among the galaxies of the relatively nearby Virgo Cluster, and the course of its orbit took it on a path near the cluster’s centre about three hundred million years ago. The density of gas in the inner cluster weighed on M90 like a strong headwind, stripping enormous quantities of gas from the galaxy and creating the diffuse halo that can be seen around it here. This gas is no longer available for M90 to form new stars with, and it will eventually fade as a spiral galaxy as a result.

M90 is located 55 million light-years from Earth, but it’s one of the very few galaxies getting closer to us. Its orbit through the Virgo cluster has accelerated it so much that it’s in the process of escaping the cluster entirely, and by happenstance it’s moving in our direction — other galaxies in the Virgo cluster have been measured at similar speeds, but in the opposite direction. Over the coming billions of years, we will be treated to a yet better view of M90 while it evolves into a lenticular galaxy.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It has a bright core with light spilling out, and its disc is filled with thick clumps of dark reddish dust, which swirls around the galaxy following its rotation. Parts of the disc are speckled with blue, showing brighter and hotter stars. A halo of faintly-lit gas wraps around the galaxy, extending beyond the edges of the image.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team; CC BY 4.0

The double spacecraft of ESA’s Proba-3 mission will become the most precisely controlled objects in space, maintaining a set distance from each other down to millimetre-level precision. An ESA cleanroom was turned into a hall of mirrors to test the laser-based measuring system that will maintain the pair in position for hours at a time.

“Due to launch in 2024, Proba-3 is ESA’s precision formation flying mission,” comments Damien Galano, ESA’s Proba-3 project manager. “By maintaining their relative position against one another for up to six hours per orbit at a nominal 144 m apart, the ‘Occulter’ spacecraft will cast a shadow onto its ‘Coronagraph’ counterpart to form an artificial solar eclipse in space, so that the Sun’s faint outer atmosphere or corona can be studied freely.

“But the satellite pair require a sophisticated metrology system to hold them in position – and we needed to test the flight hardware of the most precise element of this multi-faceted system, the laser-based ‘fine optical metrology’ system.”.

The project requested support from the Metrology Laboratory of ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre in the Netherlands, part of the biggest satellite test facility in Europe, operated for the Agency by European Test Services. The Lab's Ramon Vink explains: “Our challenge was to find a cleanroom long enough to encompass the full range of distances involved for the laser and its retroreflector, as far as 250 m apart.”

The team settled on the Vacuum Test Chamber-1.5 cleanroom, adds Steven Sablerolle of the Metrology Lab: “At 60 m in length the VTC-15 cleanroom was too small, so instead they installed a folding array of mirrors that could bounce the laser beam around the chamber to cross the full range of distance required.”

Jorg Versluys, Proba-3 System Engineer, says: “The Test Centre’s Metrology Lab assisted us in precisely aligning and mapping the mirrors’ positions, using their own laser trackers. The test campaign took about six weeks, mostly during the night to minimise unwanted perturbations from the rest of the busy site – even a lorry driving past on the road outside might show up in our results. This testing marked the first time the various parts of this fine optical metrology system were operated together, but the results were right in line with our previous models.”

For the testing, Proba-3’s laser-generating optic head was integrated onto the mission’s optic bench, then placed on a granite table for maximum stability. The laser was shone onto a laser retroreflector – which is a special kind of mirror, resembling reflective ‘cat’s eyes’ on a motorway, that possesses carefully-designed internal reflectivity to bounce back the laser light in the exact same direction that it has come from.

A photo diode on the optic head then recognises reflected laser light to calculate the number of wave oscillations the light has taken to bounce back, to derive its precise travel time and therefore distance between the two satellites. A second detector, a 2D array, is acquires the lateral position of the reflected laser beam to identify the lateral displacement of the retroreflector relative to the optic head.

This is the most precise of multiple metrology methods employed by the two Proba-3 satellites, each one around a cubic metre in scale. A continuous inter-satellite radio link is supplemented by Global Navigation Satellite System receivers. When the satellites come less than 250 m apart then cameras on the Occulter spacecraft will image and detect LEDs mounted on the Coronagraph spacecraft. Then the laser-based system will come into use to maintain precise satellite alignment.

“Our testing allowed us to map just how the metrology system responds as the target moves slightly up or down or side to side,” adds Jorg. “So we’ve ended up with a complete database of the two units’ movement down to pixels per millimetre scale that we can employ for real when we reach space.”

Proba-3’s laser operates at an infrared wavelength, invisible to the naked eye. So this photograph was actually acquired as a long exposure in infrared, with the path of the beam gradually traced using a sheet of white paper. The beam seen in the photo is where the paper scatters the infrared light of the laser beam.

Credits: ESA - J.Versluys

This colour-coded topographic view shows a dried-up river valley on Mars named Nirgal Vallis. Lower parts of the surface are shown in blues and purples, while higher altitude regions show up in whites, yellows, and reds, as indicated on the scale to the top right. This view is based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. It comprises data obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express on 16 November 2018 during orbit 18818. The ground resolution is approximately 14 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 315°E/27°S. North is to the right.

Learn more.

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

The Hubble Picture of the Week this week reveals the subtle glow of the galaxy named IC 3430, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It is part of the Virgo cluster, a rich collection of galaxies both large and small, many of which are very similar in type to this diminutive galaxy.

IC 3430 is a dwarf galaxy, a fact well reflected by this view from Hubble, but it is more precisely known as a dwarf elliptical or dE galaxy. Like its larger cousins, this galaxy has a smooth, oval shape lacking any recognisable features like arms or bars, and it is bereft of gas to form very many new stars. Interestingly, IC 3430 does feature a core of hot, massive blue stars, an uncommon sight in elliptical galaxies that indicates recent star-forming activity. It’s believed that ram pressure from the galaxy ploughing through gas within the Virgo cluster has ignited what gas does remain in IC 3430’s core to form some new stars.

Dwarf galaxies are really just galaxies with not many stars, usually fewer than a billion, but that is often enough for them to reproduce in miniature the same forms as larger galaxies. There are dwarf elliptical galaxies like IC 3430, dwarf irregular galaxies, dwarf spheroidal galaxies and even dwarf spiral galaxies! The so-called Magellanic spiral is a distinct type of dwarf galaxy, too, the best example being the well-known dwarf galaxies that are the Magellanic Clouds.

[Image Description: A relatively small, oval-shaped galaxy, tilted diagonally. It glows brightly at the centre and dims gradually to its edge. At the centre it is crossed by some wisps of dark dust, and a few small, blue, glowing spots are visible, where stars are forming. The galaxy is on a dark background in which many background galaxies and foreground stars can be seen.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun; CC BY 4.0

MetOp-SG-A1 and Sentinel-5 on Ariane 6 ready on the launch pad at the European spaceport in French Guiana ahead of liftoff, planned for 13 August 2025 at 02:37 CEST (12 August 21:37 Kourou time).

MetOp-SG-A1 is the first in a series of three successive pairs of satellites. The mission as a whole not only ensures the continued delivery of global observations from polar orbit for weather forecasting and climate analysis for more than 20 years, but also offers enhanced accuracy and resolution compared to the original MetOp mission – along with new measurement capabilities to expand its scientific reach.

This new weather satellite also carries the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission to deliver daily global data on air pollutants and atmospheric trace gases as well as aerosols and ultraviolet radiation.

Ariane 6 is Europe’s heavy launcher and a key element of ESA’s efforts to ensure autonomous access to space for Europe’s citizens. Ariane 6 has three stages: two or four boosters, and a main and upper stage. For this flight, VA264, the rocket is used in its two-booster configuration.

Credits: ESA- S.Corvaja

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron walk out from the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, ready for launch.

Known as “Crew-3” the four astronauts will be launched to the International Space Station from launchpad 39A, aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft “Endurance”, atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

Initially scheduled for 31 October, the launch of Crew-3 was delayed by weather and a minor crew medical issue. With a favourable forecast and the crew in good health, liftoff is now planned for 02:03 GMT/03:03 CET Thursday 11 November. This is the first spaceflight for Matthias, 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.

Visit the Cosmic Kiss mission page to learn more about Matthias’s mission.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja