View allAll Photos Tagged spacescience
Much like cosmonauts flying on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, ESA astronauts launching into space on a Crew Dragon spacecraft from the US have a pre-launch traditions.
Credits: ESA
This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows the western edge of Acheron Fossae on Mars, a region packed with diverse features: deep cracks, valleys, and meandering channels sculpted and filled by slow-moving flows of ice and rock.
We've added labels to highlight features and regions of note. Be sure to click on these labels to explore the landscape in detail!
This image comprises data gathered by Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on 24 October 2024 (orbit 26273). It 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. North is to the right. The ground resolution is approximately 16 m/pixel and the image is centred at about 37°N/220°E.
ALT-text: The Acheron Fossae region of Mars as seen by ESA’s Mars Express
Image description: A high-resolution colour image of the western edge of Acheron Fossae on Mars, showing a rugged landscape of deep fissures, valleys, and meandering channels. The terrain features alternating raised and lowered blocks (horsts and grabens), with smooth valley floors filled by slow-moving ice-rich rock. Labels highlight key geological features such as fossae, knobs, mesas, and impact craters. North is to the right.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Satellites in orbit share near-Earth space with millions of fast-moving and dangerous debris objects. From tiny fragments millimetres in size to entire satellites no longer working, no longer controlled, roaming the space highways, each debris piece travels many kilometres per second. Any impact with one of these objects threatens to atleast impair the functioning of a working spacecraft, or at worst destroy it altogether, creating ever more debris.
In this infographic from ESA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), find out about the scale of the debris problem: how much of it is up there, what scales are we talking about, and what are our satellites are up against?
Find out more in Episode one of the corresponding ESA & UNOOSA podcast, "Satellites vs. debris".
Credits: ESA / UNOOSA
As the holiday season swiftly approaches, frosty landscapes tend to be associated with the magical idea of a white Christmas. But this Copernicus Sentinel-3 image over the Antarctica Peninsula sheds light on a different perspective.
The Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost and warmest region of the Antarctic continent. It resembles a 1000-km-long arm covered with ice, stretching towards the southern tip of South America.
The peninsula’s west coast features over 100 large glaciers and numerous islands, including the big Adelaide Island, visible at the bottom of the image. Moving north, we see the Biscoe Islands, Anvers and Brabant islands, and the South Shetland Islands, separated from the northwestern tip of the peninsula by the Bransfield Strait.
Visible further north, Elephant and Clarence Islands are the outermost of the South Shetland archipelago. To the east is the A23a iceberg, currently the largest berg in the world. It calved from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in West Antarctica in 1986, but only recently, driven by winds and currents, started drifting quickly away from Antarctic waters. Like most icebergs from the Weddell Sea, A23a is likely to end up in the South Atlantic on a path called iceberg alley.
Thick ice shelves lie along the eastern side of the Peninsula, including the renowned Larsen Ice Shelf, a series of three shelves – A (the smallest), B, and C (the largest) – extending into the Weddel Sea.
Like many places on Earth, the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced warming over recent decades. This warming is believed to have triggered the retreat and break-up of the Larsen-B Ice Shelf, and the Larsen-A Ice Shelf, which disintegrated almost completely in January 1995.
Antarctica is surrounded by ice shelves, but there are increasing reports about them thinning and even collapsing. Studying ice shelves is important because they are indicators of climate change. In fact, Antarctica’s shrinking ice sheets are considered a climate tipping point. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tipping points are ‘critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible.’
Using satellites to monitor Antarctica over decades is essential, because the data they return provides authoritative evidence of trends and allows scientists to make predictions about the continent’s future.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Portrait of ESA astronaut candidate: Raphaël Liégeois
ESA's astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne.
The five candidates are Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber. The group is part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States.
The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level for future space missions. Basic training includes learning about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space systems and operations, as well as spacewalks and survival training.
The astronaut candidates are joined by Australian Space Agency astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg.
Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot
TO THE READER
This book, MAN-MADE SATELLITES, is the first of a series on Adventure in Space. This series is the story of the rocket age in which Man will pierce the atmosphere and conquer the open space beyond it. This age is going to come much sooner than most people realize.
We hope that this series will be the key that opens the door to the rocket age for you. – Willy Ley
The JANUS camera onboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is designed to take detailed, high-resolution photos of Jupiter and its icy moons.
JANUS will study global, regional and local features and processes on the moons, as well as map the clouds of Jupiter. It will have a resolution up to 2.4 m on Ganymede and about 10 km at Jupiter.
This image of planet Earth was taken during Juice’s lunar-Earth flyby at dawn on 20 August 2024. It shows the island of Hawai’i (the dark patch on the left).
The main aim of JANUS’s observations during the lunar-Earth flyby was to evaluate how well the instrument is working, not to perform scientific measurements.
Credits: ESA/Juice/JANUS; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite takes us over southern India to the capital of Telangana: Hyderabad.
Home to almost seven million people and covering about 650 sq km, Hyderabad is one of the largest metropolitan areas in India. It lies on the banks of the Musi River, which can be seen running across the middle of the image. Although steeped in history, this rapidly growing metropolis has become a hub of commerce and an international centre for information technology, earning it the nickname of Cyberabad.
Captured on 14 May 2017, the image has been processed to highlight the different features in and around the city. The yellow and browns show the built-up centre while the light greens in the surroundings show arid fields. The shades of darker green depict vegetation and areas covered by trees. Interestingly, the bright blue, which appears, for example, along the Musi River and near other water bodies, is also vegetation such as parkland and grass.
While several lakes can be seen in the image, they are gradually being lost. It has been said that the city once had 7000 lakes, but there are now only about 70 and they are being subjected to pollution as the city expands and develops. Even the city’s most famous lake, the heart-shaped Hussain Sagar, is blighted with pollution from agricultural and industrial waste and municipal sewage.
The two identical Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites carry high-resolution cameras working in 13 spectral bands. Images from the mission can be used to monitor pollution in lakes, changes in vegetation and urban growth.
This image is featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s state-of-the-art Biomass satellite has launched aboard a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The rocket lifted off on 29 April 2025 at 11:15 CEST (06:15 local time).
In orbit, this latest Earth Explorer mission will provide vital insights into the health and dynamics of the world’s forests, revealing how they are changing over time and, critically, enhancing our understanding of their role in the global carbon cycle. It is the first satellite to carry a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar for interferometric imaging. Thanks to the long wavelength of P-band, around 70 cm, the radar signal can slice through the whole forest layer to measure the ‘biomass’, meaning the woody trunks, branches and stems, which is where trees store most of their carbon.
Vega-C is the evolution of the Vega family of rockets and delivers increased performance, greater payload volume and improved competitiveness.
Credits: ESA–M. Pédoussaut
Vega-C VV21 with LARES-2 ready for launch and waiting for the gantry to be retracted on 13 July 2022 at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Vega-C brings a new level of performance to ESA's launch family. With new first and second stages and an uprated fourth stage, Vega-C increases performance to about 2.3 t in a reference 700 km polar orbit, from the 1.5 t capability of its predecessor, Vega.
Vega-C features a new, more powerful first stage, P120C, based on Vega’s P80. Atop that is a new second stage, Zefiro-40, and then the same Zefiro-9 third stage as used on Vega.
The re-ignitable upper stage is also improved. AVUM+ has increased liquid propellant capacity, to deliver payloads to multiple orbits depending on mission requirements and to allow for longer operational time in space, to enable extended missions.
The P120C motor will do double service, with either two or four units acting as strap-on boosters for Ariane 6. Sharing this component streamlines industrial efficiency and improves cost-effectiveness of both launchers.
With its larger main stages and bigger fairing – which doubles the payload volume compared to Vega – Vega-C measures 34.8 m high, nearly 5 m taller than Vega.
The new launcher configuration delivers a significant improvement in launch system flexibility. Vega-C can orbit larger satellites, two main payloads or can accommodate various arrangements for rideshare missions. ESA’s upcoming Space Rider return-to-Earth vehicle will be launched to orbit on Vega-C.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This is J0614-7251, a supernova remnant observed by XMM-Newton.
Read more about this discovery here!
[Image description: A colourful circle in the middle of this square image stands out against a pitch-black background. The circle reminds of a sugar-sweet candy, with a bright yellow centre with a pink ring around it. Around the centre, bluish green spots seem to be floating around in the image, that appear like air bubbles in the deep black sea.]
Credits: Eckhard Slawik, ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Sasaki et al (2025)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
F. Zangrandi
Images of Earth from space meet fashion last week as Vogue magazine features the ‘Fragility and Beauty’ exhibition in Milan, Italy. Through several satellite images, the Italian online edition of Vogue highlights how the exhibition creates a link between scientific research, space technology and art, focusing on the theme of climate change and sustainable development.
Organised by ESA and the Italian Space Agency and inaugurated in May this year, the ‘Fragility and Beauty’ exhibition can be seen at the Italian National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan.
This image of northern Serbia is just one of the many beautiful images from space included in the exhibition.
Originally featured on ESA’s Earth from Space video programme, this particular image was taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 28 August 2016. It is a false-colour image, and apart from being beautiful, the different colours indicate varying vegetative states. For example, yellowish patches indicate soil or freshly ploughed land, while shades of blue (primarily in the lower left) indicate either the same crop or different crops at a similar stage of growth.
The two Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites each carry an instrument that has 13 spectral bands, designed to provide images that can be used to distinguish between different crop types as well as data on numerous plant features, such as active chlorophyll content and leaf water content, all of which are essential to accurately monitor plant growth.
This kind of information helps informed decisions to be made, whether they are about deciding how much water or fertiliser is needed for a maximum harvest or for forming strategies to address climate change.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Aeolus upper composite being hoisted into the launch tower at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. ESA's Aeolus satellite has been at the launch site since early July where it has been tested and prepared for launch. It will be taken into orbit on a Vega rocket.
Credits: ESA
This artist’s rendition of time in space captures the movement, drama, and complexity of this cosmic abstraction.
Time is infamously relative. Whether an activity takes seconds or hours depends on your point of view. For astronauts living off-planet and experiencing roughly 16 sunrises and sunsets a day, the concept of time is even more warped. If astronauts float through space, do they also cruise through an altered sense of time?
Since perceptions of time and space are believed to share the same neural processes, and research on depth perception in weightlessness has shown that astronauts often underestimate distance, scientists speculate that for astronauts time also flies in space.
The Time experiment on the International Space Station investigates the claim that time subjectively speeds up in microgravity. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst performed the experiment for the first time last week and will do so again throughout his Horizons mission.
Astronauts gauge how long a visual target appears on a laptop screen and their reaction times to these prompts recorded to process speed and attention.
Scientists are not only collecting data on the neurological mechanisms at work here. The relativity of time, after all, implies that it is all in your head. As much as we can objectively measure and plot time, how individual humans perceive it is not just neurological but also psychological.
This is an important factor to life both on and off Earth.
Space is and always will be a harsh environment for humans. As homey as the Space Station tries to be, it is light years away from the known comforts of home on Earth. Naturally, this can affect mental health and in turn their cognitive abilities. Being alert and focused in space is crucial to safety. An astronaut misjudging time can delay reaction and risk the safety and success of crews and missions.
Understanding these neurological and psychological triggers that warp our sense of time means countermeasures can be developed to calibrate our mental clocks.
Bringing these countermeasures down to Earth could improve the lives of those who suffer from isolation or confinement, whether real or perceived: the elderly and bedridden, people working shifts or in isolation, mentally-ill patients, and the incarcerated.
Follow more great science being done during Alexander’s mission via the Horizons blog and on social media.
Credits: A. Suenson
The Vega-C Payload Assembly Composite (PAC) with LARES-2 has been placed onto the Upper Composite Transport Platform (PFRCS PlatForme Routière Composite Supérieur) on 5 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
Check our accessible text here.
Image description: The Sun illuminates the Moon, and chemical elements are shown on the lunar surface.
- Sunlight: Solar energy.
- Helium-3: Non-radioactive isotope for nuclear energy.
- Hydrogen: Propellant to power rockets.
- Water ice: Can be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel.
The European Space Agency’s concept mission ‘in-situ resource utilisation’ is considering options to find and use these resources on the Moon.
#ForwardToTheMoon
Credits: ESA
An oblique perspective view of a portion of the south polar Australe Scopuli region on Mars. It features an array of periglacial landforms including exposed layers of ice and dust (truncating the image from bottom left up towards the right), a mixture of bright and dark fans (top half of the image and especially towards the left), and dark patterned terrain (just visible at the top edge of the image).
The image was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.
[Image description: A perspective view of periglacial features in undulating terrain near the south pole of Mars. An exposed stack of bright and dark layers of ice and dust cuts through the image from bottom left towards the centre right edge. A mass of icy bright and dusty dark fan/arrowhead-like shapes dominate the top and left parts of the image. At top left there is a patch of dark terrain made up of dusty polygon shapes bounded by ice.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission completed its first flyby on 10 April, as the spacecraft came less than 12 700 km from Earth’s surface at 06:25 CEST, steering its trajectory towards the final destination, Mercury.
As the spacecraft closed in on our planet, reached closest approach and finally departed, images gathered with the three monitoring ‘selfie’ cameras mounted on Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), one of the three components of the BepiColombo mission, portray our planet shining through darkness. The farewell image, obtained on 11 April, also features the Moon as a tiny speck of light.
This infographic provides a simplified overview of the various imaging slots throughout the flyby manoeuvre. Relative sizes and distances are not to scale.
More information: BepiColombo takes last snaps of Earth en route to Mercury
Credits: ESA
This intricate structure of an ancient river delta once carried liquid water across the surface of Mars.
To best enjoy this image, produced with infrared and visible filters on the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) of the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, view through red/green ‘3D’ glasses. To create a stereo view like this, the orbiter’s camera uses a motor to rotate its telescope and take photos from different angles. The two views can be put together to make a three-dimensional view. Click here to see one of the pair of images that comprise the ‘stereo pair’.
The distinctive form of a delta arises from sediments that are deposited by a river as it enters slower-moving water, like a lake or a sea, for example. The ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, Nile River delta is a classic example on Earth, and uncannily similar features have been spotted on Saturn’s moon Titan and – closer to home – Mars. While liquid water is no longer present on the surface of Mars, features in the left portion of this image provide strong evidence of it having played an important role in the history of the Red Planet. Furthermore, water-ice is still stable on the surface today, and a recent discovery from Mars Express detected a pocket of liquid water below the surface.
The 100-metre-thick fan-shaped deposit seen in this image is found in Eberswalde crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars (326.33ºE/23.55ºS). The image covers an area of 31 x 7.5 km and was taken on 16 November 2018.
While presented in beautiful aqueous blues and greens, the image is false-colour. The layered rocks that comprise the delta deposits are indicated in white/yellow to purple/blue. The yellow represents the presence of oxidised iron deposits, indicating that the rocks were altered by the presence of water, while the blues signify less altered materials. This suggests that the influence of liquid water reduced over time, perhaps relating to a change in environmental conditions.
After the deposition of the delta sediments in the crater’s ancient lake, fresher sediments – some perhaps deposited by wind – accumulated to cover up a major part of the delta and its connecting channels. These secondary sediments were later eroded in the delta, exposing an inverted relief of the structure that is observed today.
This particular delta was first observed by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and has also been imaged by ESA’s Mars Express. It sits inside a 65 km wide impact basin called Eberswalde, which is almost completely buried by material ejected from the much larger and younger nearby Holden Crater.
Another example of a martian delta can be found in Jezero Crater, which was recently selected as the landing site for the NASA Mars 2020 rover. Meanwhile the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars rover, also launching in 2020, will target the ancient, once water-rich plains of Oxia Planum. The ExoMars rover will drill down to two metres below the surface to search of clues for past life preserved underground.
ESA has been exploring Mars for more than 15 years, starting with Mars Express that arrived at the Red Planet at the end of 2003, and which continues to return results today. Meanwhile the Trace Gas Orbiter will complete its first year of science investigations in April; it is sniffing the atmosphere to seek out the faint traces of gases that might be linked to active biological or geological process, and mapping the distribution of underground water-ice. It is also a data relay, providing essential communications infrastructure for current and future surface assets.
ESA and NASA are also preparing for the next stage of Mars exploration: returning a sample from the Red Planet. NASA’s 2020 rover is set to collect surface samples in small canisters that could later be retrieved by a second mission, and launched into Mars orbit. A third mission would rendezvous with the samples and return them to Earth, where they could be accessed by teams of scientists across the world.
Long-term planning is crucial 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.
Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The upper composite of the Soyuz that will lift ESA’s Cheops mission into space, along with the primary passenger, the Italian space agency’s Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation satellite, and three CubeSats: ESA’s OPS-SAT and the French space agency’s CNES's EYE-SAT and ANGELS satellites, is hoisted on top of the 3-stage rocket. Launch is scheduled for 18 December from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG/S Martin
“Articles on Space Exploration, Quizzes, Puzzles, Humor” and dozens of Factoids like the following:
“Just how heavy is this sphere called earth? Well, in round figures, it totals 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons! Huge as it is, the earth rushes rapidly across the heavens. Each day, it rotates on its axis – making the complete spin in just four minutes less than 24 hours. It is also moving at the terrific speed of 18.5 miles per second in its long voyage around the sun. This trip – which takes place once a year – covers 600 million miles. . .”
[Note: Then there's the journey around the Milky Way. Our sun and solar system orbit the Milky Way at the dizzying speed of 143 miles per second, completing an orbit in 230 million years.]
Webb’s infrared image of the galaxy cluster El Gordo (“the Fat One”) reveals hundreds of galaxies, some never before seen at this level of detail. El Gordo acts as a gravitational lens, distorting and magnifying the light from distant background galaxies. Two of the most prominent features in the image include the Thin One, highlighted in box A, and the Fishhook, a red swoosh highlighted in box B. Both are lensed background galaxies. The insets at right show zoomed-in views of both objects.
[Image description: The left two-thirds of the frame shows a field of small galaxies on a black background. Near the center of the image, a long, thin line is outlined with a white box and labeled A. At upper right, a red swoosh nearly encircling two galaxies is outlined with a white box and labeled B. The right third of the frame shows zoomed in views of the two regions in the boxes. At top in box A, a thin mottled line extends from upper left to lower right with a handful of background objects. At bottom in box B, a red swoosh wraps around from upper left to lower right, nearly encircling two small galaxies located at one o’clock and seven o’clock.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria), B. Frye (University of Arizona), P. Kamieneski (Arizona State University), T. Carleton (Arizona State University), and R. Windhorst (University of Arizona), A. Pagan (STScI), J. Summers (Arizona State University), J. D’Silva (University of Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), A. Robotham (University of Western Australia), and R. Windhorst (University of Arizona)
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.
Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja
The next evolution and upgrade of the solid rocket motor that propels both Vega-C and Ariane 6 launchers off the launch pad was tested at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 24 April 2025 on the solid-propellant booster test stand (BEAP) operated by the French Space Agency (CNES).
Firing for over two minutes the P160C completed the full hot-fire test expending all its solid-propellant as it will on a launch.
After ignition P160C delivered a maximum thrust of about 4700 kN, as expected for liftoff and the first phase of flight. According to initial recorded data, the performance met expectations. A full analysis of these test results and inspection of all components will confirm the design and provide the main justification elements for the rocket motor qualification for flight.
P160C is the larger version of the P120C rocket motor that is used as a booster for Ariane 6 and as a first stage motor for Vega-C. P160C holds 167 tonnes of solid propellant, 14 more than P120C and is a meter taller.
The P160C will allow Ariane 6 and Vega-C to launch heavier payloads and to different orbits and destinations, and it is also set to be used on the next generation in the Vega rocket family called Vega-E. The rocket motor is one of the most powerful one-piece motors in production in the world, the shell is wound in one go with a carbon-fibre composite.
The “P” in its name stands for “Powder”, as the 3.4-m cylinder houses solid propellant. The number 160 designates the 160 tonnes of propellant inside, and the C stands for “Common” as the motor is used on the two launchers.
P160C is developed by Europropulsion under contract from ArianeGroup and Avio who are developing the Ariane 6 launcher systems and Vega launcher systems for ESA. The recent test was on qualification model 3 (QM3), continuing the naming from the three models of P120C testing: a development model (DM); a first qualification model (QM1) configured for Vega-C; and a second qualification model (QM2) configured for Ariane 6.
France’s space agency CNES conducted the static fire test on the solid rocket motor test stand at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique Video du CSG-S. Martin
This velocity map, also called a ‘tachogram', shows the line-of-sight speed and direction of movement of material at the Sun's visible surface. Blue regions are moving towards the spacecraft and red regions are moving away. It was measured by the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) onboard the Solar Orbiter spacecraft on 22 March 2023.
While the map clearly shows the Sun's rotation about its axis, it also shows how material is flung out around sunspots. These sunspots are caused by magnetic fields breaking through the visible surface (photosphere) of the Sun.
The major flow pattern in sunspots is called the Evershed flow, seen in the ring around the centre of the sunspots and is always directed radially outwards from spot centre. There are both red and blue patches in the Solar Orbiter image because of the spacecraft's viewing angle. Depending on the location of the spot with respect to the spacecraft, material is flowing either away from the line of sight of the PHI instrument, or towards it.
Assembled from multiple high-resolution images taken by the PHI instrument, the diameter of the Sun's disc is spanned by around 8000 pixels. It is one image of a set of four, representing the first high-resolution full-disc views of the Sun from PHI and an image of the Sun's corona taken by Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI).
Read the full story here
Credits: ESA & ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI Team
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Image processing by PHI Team members at MPS
Post-flight news conference at ESA's European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany. From left to right: ESA Director for Human and Robotic Exploration David Parker, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, Walther Pelzer, Director General of the German Space Agency at DLR.
Credits: ESA
Here the ground has collapsed, opening up to reveal a hollow tube. Lava tubes form when the upper surface of a lava flow cools quicker than the middle of the flow, producing an insulating crust that keeps the inner lava hotter and fluid. The outside crystallizes and hardens into a shell, making a tube for hotter lava to pass through.
The main focus of the third session of Pangaea is volcanism. Lessons on the first day emphasized types of lavas and volcanoes found across Earth, Mars and the Moon.
ESA’s Pangaea training course prepares astronauts and space engineers to identify planetary geological features for future missions to the Moon, Mars and asteroids.
Leading European planetary geologists share their insights into the geology of the Solar System.
Through Pangaea, Europe is developing operational concepts for surface missions where astronauts and robots work together, among themselves and with scientists and engineers on Earth, using the best field geology and planetary observation techniques.
Stay tuned on the blog
Credits: ESA–A. Romeo
A gigantic cold front in the Perseus galaxy cluster has been observed by a trio of X-ray telescopes.
The ancient cold front can be seen at the left of the image, drifting away from the inner, younger front closer to the centre. Galactic cold fronts are nothing like the cold fronts we experience on Earth – instead they are caused by galaxy clusters colliding into one another. The gravitational pull of a larger cluster tugs a smaller cluster closer, resulting in gas in the core of the cluster being sloshed around like liquid in a glass. This creates a cold front in a spiral pattern moving outwards from the core and these sloshing cold fronts can provide a probe of the intercluster medium.
Cold fronts are the oldest coherent structures in cool core clusters and this one has been moving away from the centre of the cluster for over five billion years – longer than our Solar System has been in existence. The long curving structure spans around two million light years and is travelling at around 50 kilometres per second.
The image combines data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray observatory, ESA's XMM-Newton and the German Aerospace Centre-led ROSAT satellite. Chandra also took a separate close-up of the upper left of the cold front, revealing some unexpected details.
The Perseus galaxy cluster contains thousands of galaxies and a supermassive black hole at the centre. The black hole is responsible for creating a harsh environment of sound waves and turbulence that should erode a cold front over time, smoothing out the previously sharp edges and creating gradual changes in density and temperature. Instead, the high-resolution Chandra image showed a surprisingly sharp edge on the cold front, and a temperature map revealed that the upper left of the cold front is split in two.
The sharpness of the cold front suggests it has been preserved by strong magnetic fields wrapped around it, essentially acting as a shield against the harsh environment. This magnetic "draping" prevents the cold front from diffusing and is what has allowed it to survive so well for over five billion years as it drifts away from the centre of the cluster.
Credits: NASA/CXC/GSFC/S. Walker, ESA/XMM, ROSAT
Cerberus Fossae can be seen in 3D when viewed using red–green or red–blue glasses.
The anaglyph was derived from data acquired by the nadir channel and the stereo channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express on 27 January 2018 during orbit 17813. The image is centred at about 159°E/10°N.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This oblique perspective view looks across a part of Mars nicknamed Inca City (formally named Angustus Labyrinthus). The reason for this is no mystery, with the linear network of ridges being reminiscent of Inca ruins. Traces of features known as ‘spiders’ can be seen; these small, dark features form as carbon dioxide gas warms up in sunlight and breaks through slabs of overlying ice.
The image was generated from a digital terrain model and the nadir (downward-pointing) and colour channels of Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera.
[Image description: This rectangular image shows part of the martian surface as if the viewer is looking down and across the landscape, with the irregular, mottled ground appearing in swirled tones of brown and tan.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s Mars Express has used radar signals bounced through underground layers of ice to identify a pond of water buried below the surface.
This image shows an example radar profile for one of 29 orbits over the 200 x 200 km study region in the south polar region of Mars. The bright horizontal feature at the top corresponds to the icy surface of Mars. Layers of the south polar layered deposits – layers of ice and dust – are seen to a depth of about 1.5 km. Below is a base layer that in some areas is even much brighter than the surface reflections, while in other places is rather diffuse. The brightest reflections from the base layer – close to the centre of this image – are centred around 193°E/81°S in all intersecting orbits, outlining a well-defined, 20 km wide subsurface anomaly that is interpreted as a pond of liquid water.
Credits: ESA/NASA/JPL/ASI/Univ. Rome; R. Orosei et al 2018
An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have made new measurements of Uranus' interior rotation rate with a novel technique, achieving a level of accuracy 1000 times greater than previous estimates. By analysing more than a decade of Hubble observations of Uranus' aurorae, researchers have refined the planet’s rotation period and established a crucial new reference point for future planetary research.
Determining a planet’s interior rotation rate is challenging, particularly for a world like Uranus, where direct measurements are not possible. A team led by Laurent Lamy (of LIRA, Observatoire de Paris-PSL and LAM, Aix-Marseille Univ., France), developed an innovative method to track the rotational motion of Uranus’ aurorae: spectacular light displays generated in the upper atmosphere by the influx of energetic particles near the planet’s magnetic poles. This technique revealed that Uranus completes a full rotation in 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds — 28 seconds longer than the estimate obtained by NASA’s Voyager 2 during its 1986 flyby.
“Our measurement not only provides an essential reference for the planetary science community but also resolves a long-standing issue: previous coordinate systems based on outdated rotation periods quickly became inaccurate, making it impossible to track Uranus’ magnetic poles over time,” explains Lamy. “With this new longitude system, we can now compare auroral observations spanning nearly 40 years and even plan for the upcoming Uranus mission.”
This breakthrough was made possible thanks to Hubble’s long-term monitoring of Uranus. Over more than a decade, Hubble has regularly observed its ultraviolet auroral emissions, enabling researchers to track the position of the magnetic poles with magnetic field models.
“The continuous observations from Hubble were crucial,” says Lamy. “Without this wealth of data, it would have been impossible to detect the periodic signal with the level of accuracy we achieved.”
Unlike the aurorae of Earth, Jupiter, or Saturn, Uranus’ aurorae behave in a unique and unpredictable manner. This is due to the planet’s highly tilted magnetic field, which is significantly offset from its rotational axis. The findings not only help astronomers understand Uranus’ magnetosphere but also provide vital information for future missions.
The Planetary Science Decadal Survey in the US prioritized the Uranus Orbiter and Probe concept for future exploration.
These findings set the stage for further studies that will deepen our understanding of one of the most mysterious planets in the Solar System. With its ability to monitor celestial bodies over decades, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to be an indispensable tool for planetary science, paving the way for the next era of exploration at Uranus.
Credits: ESA/Hubble, NASA, L. Lamy, L. Sromovsky; CC BY 4.0
This new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an astounding number of galaxies. The objects in this frame span an incredible range of distances, from stars within our own Milky Way, marked by diffraction spikes, to galaxies billions of light-years away.
The star of this image is a group of galaxies, the largest concentration of which can be found just below the centre of this image. These galaxies glow with white-gold light. We see this galaxy group as it appeared when the Universe was 6.5 billion years old, a little less than half the Universe’s current age.
More than half of the galaxies in our Universe belong to galaxy groups like the one pictured here. Studying galaxy groups is critical for understanding how individual galaxies link up to form galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the Universe. Belonging to a galaxy group can also alter the course of a galaxy’s evolution through mergers and gravitational interactions.
The galaxy group pictured here is the most massive group in what’s called the COSMOS-Web field. COSMOS stands for Cosmic Evolution Survey. This survey has enlisted several telescopes, including Webb, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory to gaze deeply at a single patch of sky.
COSMOS-Web aims to understand how massive structures like galaxy clusters came to be. Webb’s infrared capabilities and sensitive instruments have pushed the search for galaxy groups farther back into cosmic history, revealing galaxy groups as far back as when the Universe was only 1.9 billion years old — just 14% of its current age.
This image combines infrared data from Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) instrument with further infrared observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The X-ray data, shown in purple, highlights the presence of hot gas concentrated within the X-ray galaxy group. These X-ray data come from ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, with contributions from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
This image presents a visual feast of galaxies. Take a moment to zoom in and examine the galactic buffet: you’ll see galaxies with delicate spiral arms or warped disks, galaxies with smooth, featureless faces, and even galaxies that are interacting or merging and have taken on an array of strange shapes.
The range of colours is also fascinating, representing both galaxies with different ages of stars — younger stars appear bluer, and older stars appear redder — as well as galaxies at different distances. The more distant a galaxy, the redder it appears.
COSMOS-Web is a 255-hour Webb Treasury programme that maps 0.54 square degrees (a little more than two-and-a-half times the area covered by three full moons) of the COSMOS field using four NIRCam filters. Treasury programmes have the potential to answer multiple important questions about our Universe.
COSMOS-Web has three key goals: to identify galaxies during the epoch of reionization, when the first stars and galaxies reionized the Universe’s hydrogen gas; to probe the formation of the Universe’s most massive galaxies; and to understand how the relationship between the mass of a galaxy’s stars and the mass of its extended galactic halo evolves over the course of cosmic history.
[Image Description: An area of deep space with thousands of galaxies in various shapes and sizes on a black background. A few gold-coloured galaxies are bunched closely together in the centre. A large, translucent purple cloud lies over the galaxies, thickest across the centre where the gold galaxies sit, and fainter up to the right. This shows where X-rays are emitted by hot gas in the group of galaxies.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team; CC BY 4.0
Euclid’s Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) is a completely new development in Europe, and it is responsible for ensuring the mission points with precision, performing all the ‘slews’ (rotations) that a six-year survey mission requires.
The FGS is an onboard instrument equipped with optical sensors that image the sky from the sides of the ‘field of view’ of Euclid’s VISible instrument (VIS). The sensor uses guide stars to navigate and feeds this data into the spacecraft's Attitude and Orbit Control System to orient and maintain the telescope's precise pointing.
Before launch, the Sensor was rigorously tested, but nothing compares to the true sky under real space conditions. Cosmic rays – high energy radiation originating from the Universe and from solar flares from our Sun – sometimes caused ‘artefacts’ or false signals to appear in Euclid's observations. These false signals intermittently outnumbered real stars and Euclid's Sensor failed to resolve star patterns that it needed to navigate. This led to some interesting test results!
The most ‘loopy’ show an extreme case of Euclid failing to lock into place while observing a star field, resulting in an image of swirling star trails and ‘lassos’ as the spacecraft tried to home in on its target. Clearly, to reveal hard-to-see, subtle patterns in distant galaxies and star clusters, this won’t do. Teams got to work to come up with a fix.
The software patch was tested first on Earth with an electric model of Euclid and a simulator, then for ten days in orbit. The signs were positive, as more and more stars revealed themselves.
“Our industrial partners – Thales Alenia Space and Leonardo – went back to the drawing board and revised the way the Fine Guidance Sensor identifies stars. After a major effort and in record time, we were provided with new on-board software to be installed on the spacecraft,” explains Micha Schmidt, Euclid Spacecraft Operations Manager.
“We carefully tested the software update step by step under real flight conditions, with realistic input from the Science Operations Centre for observation targets, and finally the go-ahead was given to re-start the Performance Verification phase.”
Giuseppe Racca, Euclid Project Manager adds; “The performance verification phase that was interrupted in August has now fully restarted and all the observations are carried out correctly. This phase will last until late November, but we are confident that the mission performance will prove to be outstanding and the regular scientific survey observations can start thereafter.”
Credits: ESA / Euclid Consortium / TAS-I, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Europe’s first MetOp Second Generation, MetOp-SG-A1, weather satellite – which hosts the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission – has launched aboard an Ariane 6 rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana. The rocket lifted off on 13 August 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 was used in its two-booster configuration.
Credits: ESA - S.Corvaja
ESA's newly selected astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 arrived at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, on 3 April 2023 to begin their 12-month basic training.
The group of five candidates, Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber, are part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States in November 2022.
The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level of standards in preparation for future space missions. During basic training, this includes learning all about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space systems and operations, as well as spacewalk and survival training.
This image shows the candidates an Australian astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg, joining the group under agreement with Australian Space Agency, on their first day at the European Astronaut Centre, ready to embark on their journey to become certified ESA astronauts.
Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja
This is the launcher that will transport BepiColombo to orbit. The upper part with the spacecraft and the fairing will be integrated in the ‘final assembly building’.
The image captures the transfer of the Ariane 5 launcher from the ‘launcher integration building’ to the ‘final assembly building’ at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou last week.
BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It is the first European mission to Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner Solar System, and the first to send two spacecraft to make complementary measurements of the planet’s dynamic environment at the same time.
Launch is currently scheduled for 01:45 GMT on 20 October. Check for updates and follow the launch live
Credits: ESA-H. Ritter
This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a rare cosmic phenomenon called an Einstein ring. What at first appears to be a single, strangely shaped galaxy is actually two galaxies that are separated by a large distance. The closer foreground galaxy sits at the center of the image, while the more distant background galaxy appears to be wrapped around the closer galaxy, forming a ring.
Einstein rings occur when light from a very distant object is bent (or ‘lensed’) about a massive intermediate (or ‘lensing’) object. This is possible because spacetime, the fabric of the Universe itself, is bent by mass, and therefore light travelling through space and time is bent as well. This effect is much too subtle to be observed on a local level, but it sometimes becomes clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales. Such as when the light from one galaxy is bent around another galaxy or galaxy cluster.
When the lensed object and the lensing object are perfectly aligned, the result is the distinctive Einstein ring shape. This appears as a full circle (as seen here) or a partial circle of light around the lensing object, depending on the precision of the alignment. Objects like these are the ideal laboratory in which to research galaxies too faint and distant to otherwise see.
The lensing galaxy at the center of this Einstein ring is an elliptical galaxy, as can be seen from the galaxy’s bright core and smooth, featureless body. This galaxy belongs to a galaxy cluster named SMACSJ0028.2-7537. The lensed galaxy wrapped around the elliptical galaxy is a spiral galaxy. Even though its image has been warped as its light travelled around the galaxy in its path, individual star clusters and gas structures are clearly visible.
The Webb data used in this image were taken as part of the Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey (programme 5594), which is led by Guillaume Mahler at University of Liège in Belgium, and consists of a team of international astronomers. This survey aims to trace 8 billion years of galaxy cluster evolution by targeting 182 galaxy clusters with Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera instrument. This image also incorporates data from two of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
[Image Description: In the centre is an elliptical galaxy, seen as an oval-shaped glow around a small bright core. Around this is wrapped a broad band of light, appearing like a spiral galaxy stretched and warped into a ring, with bright blue lines drawn through it where the spiral arms have been stretched into circles. A few distant objects are visible around the ring on a black background.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Mahler; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgements: M. A. McDonald
When the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton pointed its telescope at two unidentified sources of light in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud, scientists were able to confirm what seemed an unlikely discovery. They found two supernova remnants in the far reaches of our neighbouring galaxy.
The two objects that XMM-Newton looked at are shown as the two circles in the lower left of this visible-light image of the Large Magellanic Cloud: J0624-6948 (orange, higher in the image) and J0614-7251 (blue, lower in the image). The yellow crosses represent supernova remnants that had been found before.
It is surprising that these two sources of light turned out to be supernova remnants, far away from all other echoes of stellar explosions that we knew of before. Scientists believe, that for the shock of a supernova to leave such an imprint on its surroundings, the dying star must be in an environment that is dense enough with charged particles (ionised gas). This is not usually the type of gas we find so far in the outer reaches of a galaxy.
This is one of the new things we can learn from XMM-Newton’s discovery: The environment around the Large Magellanic Cloud is made up of more electrically charged gas than we would expect. The reason for this likely lies in how the galaxy is interacting with the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud. In this way, these two supernova remnants are helping us to better understand the dynamics of our home galaxy’s neighbourhood.
XMM-Newton observed the two remnants in three different types of X-ray light. This resulted in the three colours (yellow, purple and blue) in the images that appear when clicking on the two circles. They give an indication of the chemical elements that are most common in different parts of the remnants.
The yellow colour that is for example dominant in the centre of J0614-7251 tells us that this part of the supernova remnant is made up mostly of iron. This clue allowed scientists to classify this remnant for the very first time as the result of a Type-Ia supernova. This was possible because the new image by XMM-Newton shows enough detail to distinguish the inner circle and outer ring of the remnant clearly enough.
Find the scientific paper about this discovery here.
[Image Description: A vast sea of speckles of stars against a faded black background. In the centre of the image, the stars cluster to form a bright and dense green cottoncandy-colored haze, that is the Large Magellanic Cloud. Scattered across the middle of the image are about 50 small yellow crosses, some of them are so close to one another that they almost overlap. In the lower left quarter of the image, two circles were drawn that lay wide apart: an orange circle towards the horizontal middle of the image, and a blue one to the lower right of it.]
Credits: Eckhard Slawik, ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Sasaki et al (2025)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
F. Zangrandi
ESA’s Hera mission lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA, on 7 October at 10:52 local time (16:52 CEST, 14:52 UTC).
Hera is ESA’s first planetary defence mission. It will fly to a unique target among the 1.3 million asteroids in our Solar System – the only body to have had its orbit shifted by human action – to solve lingering unknowns associated with its deflection.
Hera will carry out the first detailed survey of a ‘binary’ – or double-body – asteroid, 65803 Didymos, which is orbited by a smaller body, Dimorphos. Hera’s main focus will be Dimorphos, whose orbit around the main body was previously altered by NASA’s kinetic-impacting DART spacecraft.
By sharpening scientific understanding of this ‘kinetic impact’ technique of asteroid deflection, Hera should turn the experiment into a well-understood and repeatable technique for protecting Earth from an asteroid on a collision course.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
Closing the fairing for the first flight of Ariane 6 at the encapsulation hall in Europe's Spaceport, French Guiana, 6 June 2024.
This fairing for Ariane 6 will ensure the cargo is kept at a nice ambient temperature and humidity while also protecting it from the elements. It also provides a sleek aerodynamic shape to help Ariane 6 overcome the atmosphere as it thunders upwards to space. It is 5.4 m wide and 14 m tall and adapted to carry the widest array of space missions.
The fairing consists of two huge half-shells, made in one piece from carbon-glass fibre composite which is ‘cured’ in an industrial oven, reducing cost and speeding up production. Fewer parts allow for horizontal as well as vertical assembly of the closed fairing and the launch vehicle, which is particularly important for Ariane 6.
Ariane 6 is Europe’s new heavy lift launch vehicle replacing its extremely successful predecessor, Ariane 5. Modular and agile, Ariane 6 has a reignitable upper stage allowing it to launch multiple missions on different orbits on a single flight.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Arianegroup/Optique Vidéo du CSG - S.Martin
On the first day of the 15th annual European Space Weather Week, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope fittingly shows a striking occurrence of celestial weather in the outer reaches of the Solar System: an aurora on Uranus.
Auroras, also known as polar lights, are a relatively familiar type of space weather to Earth-based stargazers, but have also been spied on many other planets in the Solar System.
Views of the Earth’s Northern and Southern Lights show glowing sheets and rippling waves of bright light painting the sky in striking shades of green and even red, blue, and purple; these breath-taking scenes are created as streams of energetic charged particles hit the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere at altitudes of up to a few hundreds of kilometres, and interact with resident atoms and molecules of mostly oxygen and nitrogen. These emit photons at specific visible wavelengths or colours – green and red for oxygen, blue and purple for nitrogen – and fill the sky with an eerie auroral glow.
Hubble has observed auroras on Uranus on various occasions: in 2011, when the telescope became the first to image the phenomenon from the vicinity of Earth, then again in 2012 and 2014, taking extra data beyond visible light.
By pointing Hubble’s ultraviolet eye on Uranus twice during the same month, from 1 to 5 and 22 to 24 November 2014, scientists were able to determine that the planet’s glimmering auroras rotate along with the planet. The observations also helped to locate Uranus’ magnetic poles, and allowed scientists to track two so-called interplanetary shocks that propagated through the Solar System. These shocks were triggered by two powerful bursts of material flung out by the Sun via the solar wind, an ongoing flow of charged particles constantly emanating from our star, and caused the most intense auroras ever seen on Uranus.
This image, originally published in 2017, shows the auroras as wispy patches of white against the planet’s azure blue disc, and combines optical and ultraviolet observations from Hubble with archive data from NASA’s Voyager 2 probe. Voyager 2 was the first and only craft to visit the outermost planets in the Solar System; it flew past Uranus in January 1986, and past Neptune in August 1989. These icy planets have not been visited since. NASA and ESA have been studying a possible joint mission that would target the two ice giant planets in order to explore their intriguing role in our planetary system.
European Space Weather Week runs from 5 to 9 November 2018, and brings together engineers, scientists, specialists, and professionals from across the continent in order to exchange news, ideas, and strategies on space weather and protecting Earth’s cosmic environment.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Lamy / Observatoire de Paris
ESA's deep space tracking station in Malargüe, Argentina, receives signals from a distant spacecraft on a cold winter day in the southern hemisphere.
Credits: ESA / Filippo Concaro
Portrait of ESA astronaut candidate: Pablo Álvarez Fernández
ESA's astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne.
The five candidates are Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber. The group is part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States.
The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level for future space missions. Basic training includes learning about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space systems and operations, as well as spacewalks and survival training.
The astronaut candidates are joined by Australian Space Agency astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg.
Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot
ESA’s Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), the centre-bottom box in this image, is seen here after its installation in SpaceX Dragon’s open cargo carrier ahead of next week’s launch. On 2 April, a Falcon 9 rocket will deliver this instrument to the International Space Station to begin its mission of chasing down elusive electrical discharges in the atmosphere.
For years, their existence has been debated: elusive electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere were reported by pilots, but these ‘transient luminous events’, also known as red sprites, blue jets, and elves, are difficult to study because they occur above thunderstorms.
Satellites have probed them and observations have even been made from mountain tops but their viewing angle is not ideal for gathering data on large scales.
Then, in 2015, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen managed to record many kilometre-wide blue flashes around 18 km altitude, including a pulsating blue jet reaching 40 km from the International Space Station. A video recorded by Andreas as he flew over the Bay of Bengal at 28 800 km/h shows the electrical phenomena clearly – a first of its kind.
The Space Station’s low orbit proved again to be the vantage point from which a large part of Earth along the equator could be observed and these sprites and jets could be captured.
Researchers want to investigate the relationship between terrestrial gamma-ray bursts, lightning and high-altitude electric discharges across all seasons by tracking and collecting data continuously for at least two years.
Aside from being a little-understood phenomenon and part of our world, these powerful events can reach high above the stratosphere and have implications for how our atmosphere protects us from space radiation.
ASIM is an international project funded by ESA in close collaboration with NASA and is led by a team of scientists from the National Space Institute of the Danish Technical University (DTU Space).
Credits: © 2018 Space Exploration Technologies Corp. All rights reserved
The changing face of the Chilean glaciers in the Laguna San Rafael National Park is featured in these satellite images from 1987 and 2024.
Located on the Pacific coast of southern Chile, the park covers an area of around 17 000 sq km and includes the Northern Patagonian Ice Field – a remnant of the Patagonian Ice Sheet that once covered the region. Today, despite the ice field being just a fraction of its previous size, it is still the second largest continuous mass of ice outside the polar regions.
As we can see in the images, the ice mass feeds glaciers that have changed in size between 1987 and 2024. The Landsat-5 image on the left was acquired on 9 February 1987, while the image on the right captured the ice field on 9 February 2024 as seen by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
The west part of the Northern Patagonian Ice Field feeds 28 exit glaciers. The largest two, San Rafael and San Quintín, are pictured here. Both glaciers have been receding dramatically due to global warming.
The San Rafael glacier, in the upper left, is one of the most actively calving glaciers in the world. It calves west towards the Pacific Ocean and into an arc-shaped lake, Laguna San Rafael, visible directly to the left of the glacier. The lake is formed and fed by the retreat of the glacier.
Like Laguna San Rafael, many lakes in the area are fed by water from melting glaciers. In the images, the colour of the water varies from dark blue to aquamarine depending on the amount of suspended fine sediment present. This sediment is called ‘glacier milk’ and is a result of abrasion as glaciers move over the underlying rock. This is particularly clear in San Rafael lake, where we can also see icebergs floating in the water.
Directly below San Rafael lies the San Quintín glacier, the second largest in the ice field. The glacier drains to the west and, taking a closer look at its terminus in both images, we can see how, in 1987, the glacier almost terminated on land, but, with its retreat, the basin filled with water and formed the proglacial lake we see in 2024.
Glaciers around the world are affected by climate change. As temperatures rise and glaciers and ice sheets melt, the water eventually runs into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise. Rising seas are one of the most distinctive and potentially devastating consequences of Earth’s warming climate.
Satellite observations can greatly contribute to the precise monitoring of glacier change. The pace at which glaciers are losing mass in the long term is very important to making informed future adaptation decisions.
Credits: USGS/ESA
On 30 March 2025 the European commercial rocket Spectrum, developed and operated by Isar Aerospace, took flight from Andøya Spaceport in Norway and flew for 30 seconds, clearing the launch pad and proving the launch vehicle can achieve one of the hardest parts of space transportation: liftoff.
Isar Aerospace’s two-stage launch vehicle Spectrum is 28 m tall, 2 m in diameter and, with its ten engines, it is targeting to launch payloads of up to 1000 kg to low Earth orbit.
The flight allows Isar Aerospace engineers to analyse all the data they need to tweak their Spectrum launcher for a next flight.
“Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success”, said Isar Aerospace CEO Daniel Metzler, “We had a clean liftoff, 30 seconds of flight and even got to validate our Flight Termination System.”
“A test-flight is exactly that: a test to gather data, learn and improve. Everything Isar Aerospace achieved today is remarkable and they will have lots of data to analyse. I applaud the teams for getting this far and I am confident that we will see the next Spectrum on the launch pad ready for test-flight 2 liftoff soon,” said ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher.”
Isar Aerospace is a German-based company, building their Spectrum launch vehicle in state-of-the-art production facilities relying on in-house manufacturing.
Initially supported by ESA’s Business Incubation Centre, the company is supported by as part of the Boost! programme that helps commercial initiatives offering transportation services to space, in space, and returning from space.
Credits: Isar Aerospace/Wingmen Media–S. Fischer
To create a 3D map of the Universe, Euclid will observe the light from galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. Most galaxies in the early Universe don’t look like a neat spiral but are irregular and small. They are the building blocks for bigger galaxies like our own.
This first irregular dwarf galaxy that Euclid observed is called NGC 6822 and is located close by, just 1.6 million light-years from Earth. It is a member of the same galaxy cluster as the Milky Way (called the Local Group), and was discovered in 1884. In 1925 Edwin Hubble was the first to identify NGC 6822 as a ‘remote stellar system’ well beyond the Milky Way.
NGC 6822 has been observed many times since, most recently by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. But Euclid is the first to capture the entire galaxy and its surroundings in high resolution in about one hour, which would not be possible with telescopes on the ground (the atmosphere prevents this sharpness) or with Webb (which makes very detailed images of small parts of the sky).
One interesting aspect of this galaxy is that its stars contain low amounts of elements that are not hydrogen and helium. These heavier, ‘metal’ elements are produced by stars over their lifetimes and are therefore not very common in the early Universe (before the first generation of stars had been born, lived and died).
“By studying low-metallicity galaxies like NGC 6822 in our own galactic neighbourhood, we can learn how galaxies evolved in the early Universe,” explains Euclid Consortium scientist Leslie Hunt of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, on behalf of a broader team working on showcasing galaxies imaged by Euclid.
In addition to studying the star-formation history of this galaxy, which can now be done thanks to the colour information from Euclid’s near-infrared instrument and its wide field of view, scientists have already spotted many globular star clusters in this image that reveal clues as to how the galaxy was assembled.
Globular clusters are collections of hundreds of thousands of stars held together by gravity. They are some of the oldest objects in the Universe, and most of their stars were all formed out of the same cloud. That’s why they hold the ‘fossil records’ of the first star-formation episodes of their host galaxies. See also Euclid’s first image of globular cluster NGC 6397.
The data in this image were taken in about one hour of observation. This colour image was obtained by combining VIS data and NISP photometry in Y and H bands; its size is 8800 x 8800 pixels. VIS and NISP enable observing astronomical sources in four different wavelength ranges. Aesthetics choices led to the selection of three out of these four bands to be cast onto the traditional Red-Green-Blue colour channels used to represent images on our digital screens (RGB). The blue, green, red channels capture the Universe seen by Euclid around the wavelength 0.7, 1.1, and 1.7 micron respectively. This gives Euclid a distinctive colour palette: hot stars have a white-blue hue, excited hydrogen gas appears in the blue channel, and regions rich in dust and molecular gas have a clear red hue. Distant redshifted background galaxies appear very red. In the image, the stars have six prominent spikes due to how light interacts with the optical system of the telescope in the process of diffraction. Another signature of Euclid special optics is the presence of a few, very faint and small round regions of a fuzzy blue colour. These are normal artefacts of complex optical systems, so-called ‘optical ghost’; easily identifiable during data analysis, they do not cause any problem for the science goals.
The cutout from the full view of NGC 6822 is at the high resolution of the VIS instrument. This is nine times better than the definition of NISP that was selected for the full view; this was done for the practical reason of limiting the format of the full image to a manageable size for downloading. The cutout fully showcases the power of Euclid in obtaining extremely sharp images over a large region of the sky in one single pointing. Although this image represents only a small part of the entire colour view, the same quality as shown here is available over the full field. The full view of NGC 6822 at the highest definition can be explored on ESASky.
[Image description]
This square astronomical image is speckled with numerous stars visible across the black expanse of space. Most stars are visible only as pinpoints. More stars are crowding the centre of the image, visible as an irregular round shape. This is an irregular galaxy. The centre of the galaxy appears whiter and the edges yellower. Several pink bubbles are visible spread throughout the galaxy. The stars across the entire image range in colour from blue to white to yellow/red, across a black background of space. Blue stars are younger and red stars are older. A few of the stars are a bit larger than the rest, with six diffraction spikes.
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This image of the stellar jet in Sh2-284, captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.
The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped to the direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).
The scale bar is labeled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year, and arcsec (It takes 1.1 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the scale bar.) One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers.
This image shows invisible near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colors. The color key shows which NIRCam filters were used when collecting the light. The color of each filter name is the visible light color used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.
[Image description: Image titled “James Webb Space Telescope; Stellar Jet; SH2-284,” with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key. Gaseous yellow-orange filaments look like a rose seen from the side and tilted slightly from upper left to lower right, slightly higher than the center of the frame. Extending from the rose to upper left and lower right are gaseous outflows that appear as red lobes that have an overall shape of tall, narrow triangles with rounded tips. At the bottom left are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The east arrow points toward 10 o’clock. The north arrow points in the 2 o’clock direction. At the bottom left is a scale bar labeled 1.1 light-years, 15 arcsec. The length of the scale bar is about one sixth of the total image. Below the image is a color key showing which NIRCam filters were used to create the image and which visible-light color is assigned to each filter. From left to right: F162M and 182M are blue, F200W and F356W are green, and F405N and F470N are red.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Y. Cheng (NAOJ), J. DePasquale (STScI); CC BY 4.0
The graceful winding arms of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 stretch across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike the menagerie of weird and wonderful spiral galaxies with ragged or disrupted spiral arms, grand-design spiral galaxies boast prominent, well-developed spiral arms like the ones showcased in this image. This galactic portrait was captured by Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam).
In this image, the dark red features trace the filamentary warm dust, while colours of red, orange, and yellow show the sign spots of ionised gas by the recently formed star clusters. Stellar feedback has a dramatic effect on the medium of the galaxy and create complex network of bright knots as well as cavernous black bubbles.
M51 — also known as NGC 5194 — lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbour, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbours one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. The gravitational influence of M51’s smaller companion is thought to be partially responsible for the stately nature of the galaxy’s prominent and distinct spiral arms. If you would like to learn more about this squabbling pair of galactic neighbours, you can explore earlier observations of M51 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope here.
This Webb observation of M51 is one of a series of observations collectively titled Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers, or FEAST. The FEAST observations were designed to shed light on the interplay between stellar feedback and star formation in environments outside of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Stellar feedback is the term used to describe the outpouring of energy from stars into the environments which form them, and is a crucial process in determining the rates at which stars form. Understanding stellar feedback is vital to building accurate universal models of star formation.
The aim of the FEAST observations is to discover and study stellar nurseries in galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Before Webb became operative, other observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in the Chilean desert and Hubble have given us a glimpse of star formation either at the onset (tracing the dense gas and dust clouds where stars will form) or after the stars have destroyed with their energy their natal gas and dust clouds. Webb is opening a new window into the early stages of star formation and stellar light, as well as the energy reprocessing of gas and dust. Scientists are seeing star clusters emerging from their natal cloud in galaxies beyond our local group for the first time. They will also be able to measure how long it takes for these stars to pollute with newly formed metals and to clean out the gas (these time scales are different from galaxy to galaxy). By studying these processes, we will better understand how the star formation cycle and metal enrichment are regulated within galaxies as well as what are the time scales for planets and brown dwarfs to form. Once dust and gas is removed from the newly formed stars, there is no material left to form planets.
[Image Description: A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s centre, but it is tightly limited to the core. The rings feature colours of deep red and orange, which are surrounded by cloudier regions of white and grey, with regions of black surrounding the distinct narrow spiral arms.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team