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The third Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite, Sentinel-1C, has launched aboard a Vega-C rocket, flight VV25, from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The rocket lifted off on 5 December 2024 at 22:20 CET (18:20 local time).
Sentinel-1C extends the legacy of its predecessors, delivering high-resolution radar imagery to monitor Earth’s changing environment, supporting a diverse range of applications and advance scientific research. Additionally, Sentinel-1C introduces new capabilities for detecting and monitoring maritime traffic.
The launch also marks Vega-C’s ‘return to flight’, a key step in restoring Europe’s independent access to space. Vega-C is the evolution of the Vega family of rockets and delivers increased performance, greater payload volume and improved competitiveness.
Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja
The first Meteosat Third Generation Imager (MTG-I1) satellite lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 13 December at 21:30 CET.
To celebrate this moment, an event with experts took place at ESA's technical heart in the Netherlands.
MTG-I1 is the first of six satellites that form the full MTG system, which will provide critical data for weather forecasting over the next 20 years. In full operations, the mission will comprise two MTG-I satellites and one MTG Sounding (MTG-S) satellites working in tandem.
Credits: ESA - SJM Photography
This image was captured during a dynamic balancing test of the ExoMars 2022 descent module. The image is slightly blurred because the module is spinning. (Click here for movie
). Inside the descent module is the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok surface platform that will fly to Mars.
The dynamic balancing test is necessary to ensure the spacecraft is perfectly balanced when spinning in space.
The tests were conducted in the anechoic chamber in Thales Alenia Space’s facilities in Cannes, France. The cleanroom conditions provide a controlled environment to prevent contamination, and where temperature, pressure, humidity and dust concentration are all continuously monitored and recorded.
Credits: Thales Alenia Space
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) being lowered into the Large Space Simulator on 29 May ahead of a month-long test campaign that will see the spacecraft subject to extreme temperature cycles under vacuum to replicate the extreme heating and cooling that the spacecraft will experience on its way to Jupiter. The Large Space Simulator is Europe's single largest vacuum chamber standing 15 m high and 10 m wide.
Once in the Jovian system Juice will make detailed observations of Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – with a suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. The mission will investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the Jupiter system as an archetype for the numerous giant exoplanets now known to orbit other stars.
Credits: ESA/Lightcurve Films
The BepiColombo 'ministack', comprising JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (top) and ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (bottom), transferring between facilities at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou. The modules spent the first part of the launch campaign in the 'processing area' before moving to the 'fueling integration area' where the chemical propulsion fueling activities will take place.
In this view the MPO's radiator side is visible – the radiator 'fins' have now been installed. The radiator is designed to reflect heat directionally, allowing the spacecraft to fly at low altitude over the hot surface of planet Mercury.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique video du CSG – P.Baudon
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Image description: Apollo landing sites on the Moon.
Twelve people walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972.
They left scientific experiments on the surface and came back to Earth with nearly 400 kg of lunar rocks and soil.
- Apollo 11. 21 July 1969. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins.
- Apollo 12. 19 November 1969. Charles Conrad, Alan Bean, Richard Gordon.
- Apollo 13. 11 April 1970. James Lovell, John Swigert, Fred Haise.
- Apollo 14. 5 February 1971. Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, Stuart Roosa.
- Apollo 15. 31 July 1971. David Scott, James Irwin, Alfred Worden.
- Apollo 16. 21 April 1972. John Young, Charles Duke, Thomas Mattingly.
- Apollo 17. 11 December 1972. Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, Ronald Evans.
The European Space Agency is looking with international partners to bring back more rocks from the Moon using robots.
#ForwardToTheMoon
Credits: ESA
ESA has demonstrated expertise in studying Mars from orbit, now we are looking to secure a safe landing, to rove across the surface and to drill underground to search for evidence of life. Our orbiters are already in place to provide data relay services for surface missions. The next logical step is to bring samples back to Earth, to provide access to Mars for scientists globally, and to better prepare for future human exploration of the Red Planet.
This set of infographics highlight’s ESA’s contribution to Mars exploration as we ramp up to the launch of our second ExoMars mission, and look beyond to completing a Mars Sample Return mission.
This graphic highlights the current situation at Mars, which has six orbiters, one lander and a rover, with more getting ready to join the fleet.
Credits: ESA – S. Poletti
To hunt for threatening asteroids, astronomers use traditional telescopes with narrow fields of view – it’s a slow, tedious process.
ESA is developing new ‘flyeye’ telescopes to conduct automated nightly sky surveys.
Up to four Flyeye Telescopes will be located worldwide. Together with sightings from European and international astronomers, Flyeye data will be sent to the International Astronomical Union (IAU)’s Minor Planet Center (USA), the world’s central clearing house for all asteroid sightings.
ESA asteroid experts work with other space agencies and European civil protection authorities to devise mitigation measures. ESA also supports asteroid warning and risk assessment activities at the United Nations, in cooperation with experts from the IAU and worldwide.
Visit www.esa.int/ssa-neo for more information.
Credits: ESA
Revisiting a stone cold classic 👍
On 24 February 2007, ESA’s Rosetta made its only flyby of Mars & captured images of the Red Planet centred on Elysium Planitia. North is up.
Several different colour composites were made & published at the time, and many other people have made their own versions over the years, but I decided today to (waste time &) see what I could come up with from the archival data 💻
So here’s my RGB image of Mars from 240,000km with a resolution of ~5km/pixel.
I make no claim that this is super-accurately colour balanced & how you’d see Mars if you were close by.
Indeed, this is a notoriously difficult thing to get right due to atmospheric haze & the filters used – there are *many* so-called “true colour” images of Mars using data taken by various spacecraft, from Viking to Mars Express, Mangalyaan, Hope, & more, & to be honest, none of them really look the same.
If nothing else, the colour registration between the red, green, and blue filters is better because I sub-sampled the images (hence this image has double the linear size of the original data), and there’s more nice detail in the high altitude clouds around the limb. Some banding in the original data has been removed too.
The OSIRIS team & ESA also made other colour combinations from the wide range of filters used: you can see more of those here from 2007.
www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Rosetta/Bea...
Credit for this image: ESA/Rosetta/OSIRIS team/Mark McCaughrean CC BY 4.0
Original data credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS team/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
#SpaceScience
Filenames for the data downloaded from the ESA Planetary ScienceS Archive (psa.esa.int):
Red: NAC_2007-02-24T18.28.45.422Z_ID3D_0053001006_F88.IMG
Green: NAC_2007-02-24T18.28.12.230Z_ID3D_0053001001_F83.IMG
Blue: NAC_2007-02-24T18.28.17.017Z_ID3D_0053001002_F84.IMG
This oblique perspective view of Lycus Sulci was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express. It shows wrinkled, ridged terrain lying at the edges of the ‘aureole’ of Olympus Mons, Mars’s tallest and most imposing volcano. These ridges, created by landslides and lava-driven rockfalls, have become more prominent over time due to ongoing erosion by wind.
Image description: This tan-coloured patch of Mars's surface shows Lycus Sulci, on the aureole of Olympus Mons. Lycus Sulci is a patch of deeply textured and wrinkled ground, resembling lots of uneven ridges rising from the terrain. This image offers a close-up perspective view as if looking down over and across the region, with the ridges stretching away from the viewer.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This coloured part of this image shows the first-ever measurement by a spacecraft of how Mercury radiates in mid-infrared light. It was measured by the MERTIS instrument on the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 1 December 2024, as the spacecraft flew past the planet for the fifth time.
MERTIS, short for Mercury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer, will be a key tool for BepiColombo to uncover what Mercury's surface is made of. The colours in this image indicate how much Mercury's surface radiates with a wavelength of 8.45 micrometres. This radiance depends on what minerals the cratered surface is made of, the surface roughness and the temperature. The regularly appearing gaps on the map are due to the calibration cycle on the instrument.
The greyscale background image shows the surface of Mercury as observed by NASA’s Messenger mission. You can use the slider to directly compare MERTIS's infrared measurements to Messenger's visible light observations.
MERTIS's view during this flyby covers part of the largest impact crater on Mercury, called the Caloris Basin. The zoom panel shows a close-up of the area around the Bashō impact crater. Messenger's visible light images show that Bashō impact crater exhibits both very dark and very bright material. The MERTIS flyby observations reveal that the crater also stands out in infrared light.
The lower right shows the flyby coverage projected on the Mercury globe. The flyby MERTIS data shown in grey is overlaid on the global mosaic of a topography map based on Messenger data.
Credits: MERTIS/DLR/University of Münster & NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
This image shows a molecular cloud in the constellation of Corona Australis, or the Southern Crown, based on a combination of data from ESA’s Herschel and Planck space telescopes. The bright areas in the picture shows the emission by interstellar dust grains in three different wavelengths observed by Herschel (250, 350, and 500 microns) and the lines crossing the image in a ‘drapery pattern’ represent the magnetic field orientation (based on the Planck data.)
This molecular cloud appears as a cascading waterfall, spanning around five degrees along the horizontal side of the image. It contains a small open cluster called the Coronet, which is located at the brightest region of the image towards the left and is home to several variable stars, along with the nebula NGC 6729.
The image shows Corona Australis North on the left and Corona Australis South at the right. Corona Australis North has the densest star-forming regions of the complex, whereas Corona Australis South displays structures that are comet-like in appearance and has less star formation. In this image, the well-defined filament flows from the bright area on the top left towards the lower right, and a broader and fainter streamer flows to the upper right.
Credits: ESA/Herschel/Planck; J. D. Soler, MPIA
Asteroid researcher Kristiane Schmidt and ESA data technician Andrea Toni inspect a camera fixed to the five-storey-high rooftop of ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands, keeping a constant watch for fireballs – very bright meteors burning up in the atmosphere.
This small fisheye camera atop the ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk on the North Sea coast is one of a network of cameras stretching across Europe, called the Fireball Recovery and Planetary Inter Observation Network, FRIPON.
FRIPON cameras work together to plot the course of meteorites entering Europe’s skies, supporting efforts to retrieve fresh-fallen meteorites for study.
Find out more about the FRIPON network in this video produced for last year’s Asteroid Day .
Credits: ESA–G. Porter
An unprocessed image of a star field taken by Proba-3’s ASPIICS coronagraph and analysed by the Royal Observatory of Belgium. The vertical stripes in this image are due to an ongoing instrument calibration and will not appear in future images.
To observe the solar corona, Proba-3 carries ASPIICS, short for Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun. This instrument, developed for ESA by Centre Spatial de Liège, Belgium, is made up of a large occulting disk mounted on the Occulter spacecraft and a solar coronagraph system carried by the Coronagraph spacecraft.
While the two spacecraft were still attached to each other, the team tested the accuracy of the mission’s pointing. Essentially, the operators rotated the spacecraft by telling it which stars it should be facing. ASPIICS images of the star field were then used to verify if the pointing was correct.
Andrei Zhukov, Principal Investigator for the ASPIICS coronagraph at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, explains: “We looked at the star maps to see which stars would be visible for Proba-3 on that specific date. Choosing a single star would not be enough, because then you cannot be sure which star you are looking at. Ideally, you want at least three stars – a triangle like that can give you full orientation information.
“We chose two bright stars from the constellation of Ophiuchus – meaning ‘serpent-bearer’ in Ancient Greek – which are marked with the Greek letters δ (delta) and ε (epsilon). They are situated close enough to fit into an ASPIICS image, together with a few weaker stars. The Ophiuchus constellation is actually visible to the naked eye from anywhere on Earth.”
Andrei then asked the control team to point the spacecraft towards those stars and to capture an image of the star field using the coronagraph’s optical instrument.
“With excellent precision, the spacecraft pointed exactly where we asked it to. When we got the images, we saw the two stars straight away. They are very sharp – this is great news, because it means that during the ten seconds it took to capture the image, the spacecraft were very stable.”
At least eight stars are visible in this ASPIICS image, which is enough to confirm the pointing of the telescope. Positioning both spacecraft precisely will be crucial for observing the corona. If their alignment is off even by a few millimetres, the Sun will not be fully covered by the occulter, leading to unwanted light interrupting the observations.
In the precise alignment, the 1.4-m large disc on the Occulter spacecraft – the external occulter – will fully cover the Sun. Even then, however, so-called ‘stray light’ will spill over the occulter’s edges, creating a haze that would interfere with the corona observations.
To block the stray light, the coronagraph is equipped with another, internal occulter. In the star field image, this internal occulter is visible as a black ring, corresponding to a blackened section of one of the coronagraph’s lenses.
Andrei adds: “You can also see cosmic rays in the image, marked in purple. This is normal – in coronagraph images, cosmic ray hits often look like stars. There was a second image taken some time apart – in this one, the stars stay, and the cosmic rays appear in different locations.
“Overall, we were very pleased with the accuracy of the spacecraft pointing and the quality of the image. It made us even more excited to see the corona images, expected as early as March.”
The Royal Observatory of Belgium is hosting the ASPIICS Science Operations Centre (SOC) – a dedicated team responsible for creating operational commands for the coronagraph based on requests from the scientific community and sharing the resulting observations.
Credits: ESA
Acknowledgements: ESA/ROB
First image of the complete Orion spacecraft that will fly around the Moon on the Artemis-1 mission.
At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, the full spacecraft with the European Service Module, Crew Module Adapater and Crew Module were unveiled on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing.
The first Orion spacecraft was unveiled in its entirety on 18 July at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. After assembling the European Service Module in Bremen, Germany, and the Crew Module Adapter and Crew Module in USA, the three elements of the spacecraft are now integrated into the full Orion that stands almost as high as a two-storey house.
Power and fluid lines were connected to complete the integration and the electrical systems were started up, with the Initial Power On taking place on 2 August. Engineers will now install a heatshield panel on the spacecraft and prepare it for a September ferry flight to NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Ohio.
Testing will continue in Plum Brook to ensure the completed spacecraft can withstand the harsh environment of deep space.
Credits: NASA–R. Sinyak
ESA Astronaut Luca Parmitano in the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, Russia, 19 June 2019 wearing the Sokol suit he will wear when he is launched to the International Space Station. Sokol suits, tailored to each astronaut, are worn in the Soyuz spacecraft as protection against air leaks.
Luca is training for his Beyond mission which will see him return to the International Space Station in 2019 as part of Expedition 60/61, alongside NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov.
Luca was the first of ESA’s 2009 astronaut class to fly to the International Space Station. His first mission Volare, meaning 'to fly' in Italian, took place in 2013 and lasted 166 days. Luca conducted two spacewalks and many experiments that are still running today.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
ESA's Hera science team, including astrophysicist, stereoscopist and guitarist Sir Brian May, foreground left, and Principal Investigator Patrick Michel, right, celebrate as images from the mission's gravity-assist Mars flyby on 12 March 2025 return to ESA's ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, that evening.
Credits: Max Alexander-ESA
Meet Olympus, a four-legged robot developed and built by Jørgen Anker Olsen, visiting PhD researcher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
In this image, Olympus is positioned in the European Space Agency’s Mars yard, a facility simulating the rocky and sandy surface of Mars – an environment the robot was created for. The Mars yard is part of ESA’s Planetary Robotics Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands.
Mounted upside down to a floating platform in another one of ESA’s labs, the ORBIT facility, Olympus gets to experience simulated microgravity in two dimensions, allowing Jørgen to better understand how the robot would move under conditions it was created for: the gravity on Mars, which is about 2.5 times weaker than Earth’s gravity.
[Image description: This is a photo of a four-legged robot. The robot is made of grey and black metal and it is positioned on a rocky, uneven surface covered in orange dust, simulating the terrain found on the surface of Mars. Each of the robot’s four legs consists of two limbs with a bending joint, connected at the bottom in a paw-like patch. In the top part of the image, a large blue banner shows the European Space Agency’s logo and a text that reads ‘Planetary Robotics Lab’.]
Credits: J. A. Olsen
At Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, is being fitted into the flight adapter of the Soyuz-Fregat rocket that will lift it into space on 17 December.
In this picture, taken on 28 November, Cheops is hoisted above the conic flight adapter while the Airbus team is making sure the satellite orientation is correct before placing it on the flight adapter ring.
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.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG/J Odang
This oblique perspective view of the region surrounding Mars's north pole was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express. It shows a vast swathe of rippled sand dunes in the foreground; kilometre-high icy cliffs and escarpments beyond these dunes; and smoother layers of dust and ice in the distance.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s exoplanet-surveying Cheops satellite, with its distinctive main telescope instrument, seen being prepared for testing within ESA’s Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF) at the Agency’s ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands this month.
LEAF can subject satellites to the same volume of noise a launcher produces as it takes off and flies through the atmosphere. One wall of the chamber – which stands 11 m wide by 9 m deep and 16.4 m high – incorporates a set of enormous sound horns. Nitrogen shot through the horns can produce a range of noise up to more than 154 decibels, like standing close to multiple jets taking off.
ESA’s Cheops satellite will measure the sizes of known exoplanets by detecting tiny fluctuations in the light of their parent stars. Cheops, or ‘CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite’, combines a state-of-the-art scientific performance with a compact design – 1.5 m by 1.4 m by 1.5 m in size, it weighs in at about 300 kg fully fuelled – allowing it to be flown as a secondary passenger on a Soyuz launcher inside its ASAP-S adapter.
A test version of Cheops – its ‘structural qualification model’ plus ‘instrument structural and thermal model’ – underwent previous LEAF testing back in November 2015. Once its acoustic testing was complete this final Cheops ‘flight model’ went on to electromagnetic compatibility testing in ESA’s Maxwell facility.
Once its test campaign is complete, the satellite is scheduled for launch readiness at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana early next year.
Credits: ESA - G. Porter
ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, is getting ready for launch at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Launch is scheduled on 18 December.
In this picture, taken on 6 December, the Airbus team is performing final checks before lifting the Souyz Arianespace System for Auxiliary Payloads (ASAP-S) and positioning it on the Soyuz Fregat interface ring. The ASAP-S multi-passenger dispenser system will be used to integrate the main passenger, Cheops and the Cubesats into the launcher.
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.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG/JM Guillon
The BepiColombo Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) has returned its first image of the deployed high-gain antenna onboard the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO). The actual deployment took place earlier today, and was confirmed by telemetry.
The back side of the high-gain antenna is clearly seen at the top of the image. The side of the MPO with the low-gain antenna, which protrudes from the side of the module, is also visible, together with some detail of the MPO's multi-layered insulation. One of the hold-down release mechanisms of the MTM solar array is also seen between the antenna and the MPO. The dark outline in the top left corresponds to the inside of the MTM where the camera sits and looks out into space. A section of one of the solar arrays of the MTM is seen at the bottom of the image, together with a hold-down bracket on the yoke.
The transfer module is equipped with three monitoring cameras, which provide black-and-white snapshots in 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution. This image was taken by the ‘M-CAM 3’ camera (click here to see the location and field of view of all three monitoring cameras.)
The monitoring cameras will be used on various occasions during the cruise phase, notably during the flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury. While the MPO is equipped with a high-resolution scientific camera, this can only be operated after separating from the MTM upon arrival at Mercury in late 2025 because, like several of the 11 instrument suites, it is located on the side of the spacecraft fixed to the MTM during cruise.
BepiColombo launched at 01:45 GMT on 20 October on an Ariane 5. BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA. 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 and its dynamic environment at the same time.
Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
With the launch of ESA’s Biomass satellite scheduled for 29 April, preparations at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, have reached a key milestone. The satellite has now been sealed inside the protective fairing of the Vega-C rocket – now hidden from view, the satellite is almost ready for its journey into space.
Once 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.
Credits: ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE/Optique vidéo du CSG–S. Martin
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
Thanks to close-up images of the Sun obtained during Solar Orbiter’s perihelion passage of October 2022, solar physicists have seen how fleeting magnetic fields at the solar surface build up into the solar atmosphere.
The outer solar atmosphere is known as the solar corona. It is termed ‘quiet’ when there is little appreciable solar activity such as flares or coronal mass ejections. How the quiet corona reaches a temperature of a million °C when the surface is just at ~6000 °C is a long-running mystery.
Although the action of magnetic fields has long been suspected, the nature of the magnetic processes responsible has never been fully understood. These new images of the quiet Sun show how loops of million-degree gas – which form the building blocks of the solar corona – are associated with fleeting 100-km-sized magnetic field patches on the solar surface.
The speckled image comes from the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), and reveals the magnetic polarity of the solar surface. The red and blue shaded regions represent patches of north and south magnetic polarities. A clear correlation can be seen between the small patches of magnetic fields and the coronal loops.
The coronal loops are apparently linked to scattered concentrations of the small-scale magnetic field concentrations on the surface, often with mixed-polarity configuration. This complex arrangement and the temporal evolution of these small magnetic field patches play a role in the building of the million-degree corona.
These observations capture surface magnetic structures and coronal features at almost the same high spatial resolution of ~200 km, allowing the data from the two instruments to be closely compared. With these unique data, solar physicists now have a window to investigate the role of the small-scale magnetic fields in the building of solar corona.
Like the perihelion pass that gave these results, Solar Orbiter is currently preparing for another close pass of the Sun on 7 October 2023. On that day, the spacecraft will get as close as 43 million km to the Sun – i.e., closer to the Sun than the innermost planet Mercury. This allows Solar Orbiter to view the Sun in precise detail, revealing the previously unseen small-scale processes that appear to drive so much of the Sun’s hot atmosphere. This allows Solar Orbiter to view the Sun in precise detail, revealing the previously unseen small-scale processes that appear to drive so much of the Sun’s hot atmosphere.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. This new result is reported in the paper 'Fleeting small-scale surface magnetic fields build the quiet-Sun corona' by L. P. Chitta et al, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters 5 October 2023.
Credits: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI team
“Venus is forever veiled in many and deep cloud layers. Only one or two astronomers ever claimed to have caught a glimpse of part of the surface of Venus. They thought they saw enormous mountains, but they may have been mistaken. We are not even certain that its clouds are really water vapor. One successful Venusian probe would clear up many questions.” [Quoting from the text]
Three hours before launch on the 25 April 2018, the Rockot launcher with Sentinel-3B is undergoing the last preparations before liftoff from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Russia.Once safely in orbit and fully commissioned, this new satellite will begin its mission to map Earth’s oceans and land surfaces. Its identical twin, Sentinel-3A, has been in orbit since February 2016. The two-satellite constellation offers optimum global coverage and data delivery for Europe’s Copernicus environment programme.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
A composite view of the outer atmosphere of the Sun, the corona.
This image combines a wide-angle view of the corona from the Metis instrument on ESA’s Solar Orbiter taken in visible light (580-640 nm, shown in green) with images from the ground-based Mauna Loa K-Cor coronagraph (shown in blue) and from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) taken in ultraviolet light (19.3nm, shown in yellow). The texture represents the field lines from an extrapolation of the Sun’s magnetic field.
The combination of these complementary views shows the full extent of the solar corona. The global scale solar magnetic field confines the plasma mostly near the equatorial belt, where the field lines are closed, giving rise to the bright streamers. Polar regions, where the magnetic field lines are open, exhibit a fainter brightness due the plasma outflow in the solar wind.
Credits: Solar Orbiter/Metis Team (ESA & NASA); Mauna Loa Solar Observatory/HAO/NCAR/NSF; Predictive Science Inc./NASA/NSF/AFOSR; NASA/SDO/AIA
A part of the orbital module for the European Space Agency’s reuseable spacecraft Space Rider in the LEAF facility at the Agency’s technical heart in The Netherlands, 28 March 2025.
Space Rider is a versatile reuseable spacecraft about the size of two minivans that allows for all kind of missions, from pharmaceutical research to visiting orbital platforms and more. After missions that can last up to three months, Space Rider returns to Earth, and precision-lands on skids after a paraglider descent.
While in orbit Space Rider relies on a Vega-C rocket fourth stage called AVUM+ (Attitude Vernier Upper Module) with a new element built by Beyond Gravity for Avio, called ALEK (AVUM Life Extension Kit). The rocket fourth stage provides propulsion to move and orient the spacecraft and the ALEK provides electricity and other services needed for the orbital life of the vehicle with two solar panel wings. Together these elements make up the expendable orbital module that separates from the Space Rider reentry module before its return to Earth.
ALEK’s structure spent two months at ESA’s testing facility being put through the full range of mechanical tests and stresses it will experience when launched on a Vega-C rocket.
ALEK's last test was a shock test, checking the service module would hold it together when it separates from the Vega-C rocket that propels it to orbit. For this test, Alek was placed on top of a model of the fourth stage of Vega-C, equipped to simulate some the shocks that are generated by the rocket on ascent, verifying how the shocks are transferred through the structure. The shock test was performed in the same acoustic chamber, LEAF.
The largest European facility of its kind, ESA's Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF) is a test chamber measuring 11 m wide by 9 m deep and 16.4 m high. Its walls are made of steel-reinforced concrete 0.5 m thick to contain the sound and are coated with a thick coating of epoxy resin to reduce noise absorption and increase internal reverberation.
One wall is fitted with noise horns of the same basic design as those seen in stereo speakers which can produce noise equivalent to multiple jet aircraft lifting off simultaneously from 30 metres away.
Credits: Avio
ExoMars is a joint endeavour between ESA and Roscosmos. The rover is part of the 2020 mission, landing on Mars with a surface science platform in 2021.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This stereoscopic image shows a region near Mars’s south pole in 3D. The region features Angustus Labyrinthus (a part of Mars nicknamed ‘Inca City’ due to its linear ridges) and traces of dark features known as ‘spiders’. It was generated from data captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter on 27 February 2024. The anaglyph offers a three-dimensional view when viewed using red-green or red-blue glasses.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The team behind Europe’s first reusable rocket main stage demonstrator Themis before it heads to the launch pad at Esrange spaceport in Sweden, June 2025.
Themis encompasses all the elements for a reusable rocket stage. The Themis programme includes developing the flight test model that requires new technologies from European countries such as the vehicle landing legs, grid-fin aerodynamic stabilisers, light-weight fuel tanks, distributed power systems, avionics and reduced-diameter multi-engine bay. New flight algorithms, derived from previous European projects, will be key to make Themis land safely after flight.
Themis was developed as a European Space Agency future launchers preparatory programme with ArianeGroup as prime contractor and multiple European industrial partners. Themis’s first flight campaign is being funded by the European Commission Salto programme.
Credits: ESA/ArianeGroup
An international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spanning two decades to detect seven fast-moving stars in the innermost region of Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. These stars provide compelling new evidence for the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH).
This image shows the location of the IMBH in Omega Centauri. If confirmed, at its distance of 17 000 light-years the candidate black hole resides closer to Earth than the 4.3 million solar mass black hole in the centre of the Milky Way, which is 26 000 light-years away. Besides the galactic centre, it would also be the only known case of a number of stars closely bound to a massive black hole.
[Image Description: This image presents three panels. The first image shows the global cluster Omega Centauri, appearing as a highly dense and numerous collection of shining stars. The second image shows the details of the central region of this cluster, with a closer view of the individual stars. The third image shows the location of the IMBH candidate in the cluster.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Häberle; CC BY 4.0
This 12-panel series of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images, taken on 5–6 January 2024, presents snapshots of a full rotation of the giant planet Jupiter. The Great Red Spot can be used to measure the planet's real rotation rate of nearly 10 hours. The innermost Galilean satellite, Io, is seen in several frames, along with its shadow crossing over Jupiter's cloud tops. Hubble monitors Jupiter and the other outer Solar System planets every year under the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy programme (OPAL).
[Image description: These 12 views of Jupiter were taken by Hubble throughout the planet’s full rotation on 5–6 January 2024. At top centre is the label Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Jupiter. Next to the title are the labels F658N in red, F502N in green, and F395N in blue, which represent the filters and colours used to make these images. The date and time label for each view is centred at the bottom of each image. The Great Red Spot can be used to measure the planet’s real rotation rate of nearly 10 hours. Jupiter’s innermost moon, Io, is seen in several images, along with its shadow, crossing over Jupiter’s cloud tops.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, J. DePasquale (STScI), A. Simon (NASA-GSFC); CC BY 4.0
The full BepiColombo stack is complete with the addition of the sunshield that will protect JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter on the cruise.
BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter sits at the top of the stack inside the sunshield, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter is in the middle, and ESA’s Mercury Transfer Module is at the bottom.
Credits: ESA - M. Pedoussaut
The galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154 is so massive it is warping the fabric of space-time and distorting the appearance of galaxies behind it, an effect known as gravitational lensing. This natural phenomenon magnifies distant galaxies and can also make them appear in an image multiple times, as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope saw here. Two distant, interacting galaxies — a face-on spiral and a dusty red galaxy seen from the side — appear multiple times, tracing a familiar shape across the sky. Active star formation, and the face-on galaxy’s remarkably intact spiral shape, indicate that these galaxies’ interaction is just beginning.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, V. Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary’s University); CC BY 4.0
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of supernovae from a time when our Universe was just a small fraction of its current age. A team using Webb data has identified 10 times more supernovae in the early Universe than were previously known. A few of the newfound exploding stars are the most distant examples of their type, including those used to measure the universe’s expansion rate.
To make these discoveries, the team analyzed imaging data obtained as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. Webb is ideal for finding extremely distant supernovae because their light is stretched into longer wavelengths — a phenomenon known as cosmological redshift.
Prior to Webb’s launch, only a handful of supernovae had been found above a redshift of 2, which corresponds to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old — just 25% of its current age. The JADES sample contains many supernovae that exploded even further in the past, when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. Previously, researchers used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to view supernovae from when the universe was in the “young adult” stage. With JADES, scientists are seeing supernovae when the universe was in its “teens” or “pre-teens.” In the future, they hope to look back to the “toddler” or “infant” phase of the universe.
To discover the supernovae, the team compared multiple images taken up to one year apart and looked for sources that disappeared or appeared in those images. These objects that vary in observed brightness over time are called transients, and supernovae are a type of transient. In all, the JADES Transient Survey Sample team uncovered 79 supernovae in a patch of sky only about the thickness of a grain of rice held at arm’s length.
The team identified a number of high-redshift supernovae, including the farthest one ever spectroscopically confirmed, at a redshift of 3.6. Its progenitor star exploded when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old. It is a so-called core-collapse supernova, an explosion of a massive star.
These findings were presented in a press conference at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin. Learn more about these results here.
[Image description: Webb image showing hundreds of objects of different colors, shapes, and sizes scattered across the black background of space. There are small red blobs; larger, fuzzy white or blueish ball-shaped masses with bright centers; white, pink, or blue disc shapes; clear spiral structures; and barely discernible specs. Eighty-three of the smaller objects in the image are circled in green. Some of the circles are close together; some are far apart; some overlap. There is no apparent pattern in the distribution.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; CC BY 4.0
The incredibly distant galaxy GS-z13-1, observed just 330 million years after the Big Bang, was initially discovered with deep imaging from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Now, an international team of astronomers has definitively identified powerful hydrogen emission from this galaxy at an unexpectedly early period in the Universe’s history, a probable sign that we are seeing some of the first hot stars from the dawn of the Universe.
This image shows the galaxy GS-z13-1 (the red dot at centre), imaged with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) programme. These data from NIRCam allowed researchers to identify GS-z13-1 as an incredibly distant galaxy, and to put an estimate on its redshift value. Webb’s unique infrared sensitivity is necessary to observe galaxies at this extreme distance, whose light has been redshifted into infrared wavelengths during its long journey across the cosmos.
To confirm the galaxy’s redshift, the team turned to Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument. With new observations permitting advanced spectroscopy of the galaxy’s emitted light, the team not only confirmed GS-z13-1’s redshift of 13.0, they also revealed the strong presence of a type of ultraviolet radiation called Lyman-α emission. This is a telltale sign of the presence of newly forming stars, or a possible active galactic nucleus in the galaxy, but at a much earlier time than astronomers had thought possible. The result holds great implications for our understanding of the Universe.
[Image description: A small, zoomed-in area of deep space. Numerous galaxies in various shapes are visible, most of them small, but two are quite large and glow brightly. In the very centre is a small red dot, an extremely faraway galaxy. Two lines of light enter the left side: these are diffraction spikes, visual artefacts, caused by a nearby bright star just out of view.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, STScI, CSA, JADES Collaboration, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA), J. Witstok, P. Jakobsen, A. Pagan (STScI), M. Zamani (ESA/Webb; CC BY 4.0
ESA’s Aeolus wind satellite with its Vega rocket fairing in the cleanroom at Europe’s spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana.
Credits: ESA
Learn more about the International Space Station with infographics, including timeline of assembly, its European modules and visiting vehicles.
Credits: ESA
Artist's impression of Heracles landing on the Moon.
ESA is working with the Canadian and Japanese space agencies to prepare the Heracles robotic mission to the Moon in the mid-to-late-2020s. Using the Gateway as a halfway point, a robotic rover will scout the terrain in preparation for the future arrival of astronauts, and deliver lunar samples to Earth.
This mission offers the best and earliest chance to deliver Moon samples to Earth on NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
Goals also include testing new hardware, demonstrating technology and gaining experience in operations while strengthening international partnerships in exploration.
A small lander with a rover inside weighing around 1800 kg in total will land and be monitored by astronauts from the space gateway. An ascent module will take off from the surface and return to the gateway with samples taken by the rover.
Heracles will demonstrate these technologies and prove their value for humans. Later missions will include a pressurised rover driven by astronauts and an ascent module for the crew to return home.
Communications are key, with satellites providing high-speed networks to operate rovers from orbit, including feeding visuals from cameras, control signals to move the cameras, arms and wheels, and transmitting scientific data.
When the ascent module carrying the sample container arrives, the Gateway’s robotic arm will capture and berth it with the outpost’s airlock for unpacking and transfer of the container to Orion and subsequent flight to Earth with returning astronauts.
Heracles is an international programme to use the Gateway to the fullest and deliver samples to scientists on Earth using new technology that is more capable and lighter than previous missions.
Credits: ESA/ATG Medialab
Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbours! Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a scene from one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200 000 light-years away. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighbouring constellation Hydrus.
Thanks to its proximity, the SMC is one of only a few galaxies that can be seen from Earth without the help of a telescope or binoculars. For viewers in the southern hemisphere and some latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the SMC resembles a piece of the Milky Way that has broken off, though in reality it’s much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.
With its 2.4-metre ‘eye’ and sensitive instruments, Hubble’s view of the SMC is far more detailed and vivid than what humans can see. Researchers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument to observe this scene through four different filters. Each filter admits different wavelengths of light, creating a multicoloured view of dust clouds drifting across a field of stars. Hubble’s view, however, is much more zoomed-in than our eyes, the better for it to observe very distant objects. This image captures a small region of the SMC near the centre of NGC 346, a star cluster that is home to dozens of massive young stars.
[Image Description: An area of space that is filled with stars. Most of the stars are small, distant dots in orange colours; closer stars shine with a bright glow and four thin spikes around them. These closer stars appear in both bluish and reddish colours. Clouds from a nebula cover the left half of the scene, giving it a blue-greenish cast. More pieces of cloud drift over the black background of space on the right.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray; CC BY 4.0
On 5 December 2024, the mobile building surrounding the Vega-C rocket with Earth-observer Sentinel-1C was rolled back at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, setting the rocket up for launch to a sun-synchronous orbit.
Earth-observer Sentinel-1C is flying on Vega-C rocket flight VV25. At 35 m tall, Vega-C weighs 210 tonnes on the launch pad and reaches orbit with three solid-propellant-powered stages before the fourth liquid-propellant stage takes over for precise placement of Sentinel-1C into its orbit.
Carrying advanced radar technology to provide an all-weather, day-and-night supply of imagery of Earth’s surface, the ambitious Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission has raised the bar for spaceborne radar.
The mission benefits numerous Copernicus services and applications such as those that relate to Arctic sea-ice monitoring, iceberg tracking, routine sea-ice mapping, glacier-velocity monitoring, surveillance of the marine environment including oil-spill monitoring and ship detection for maritime security as well as illegal fisheries monitoring.
Europe’s Vega-C rocket can launch 2300 kg into space, such as small scientific and Earth observation spacecraft. Vega-C is the evolution of the Vega family of rockets and delivers increased performance, greater payload volume and improved competitiveness.
Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja
ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron move through the steps for their upcoming launch during a dry dress rehearsal at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.
As members of Crew-3, they will be launched to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft “Endurance”. The first launch attempt is scheduled for 07:21 CET (06:21 GMT, 02:21 EDT) Sunday 31 October 2021, with a backup date of 3 November.
This will be the first spaceflight for Matthias who has selected the name “Cosmic Kiss” for his six months in orbit. During the flight to and from space, he and Kayla will be what is known as “mission specialists”. They will work with commander Raja Chari and pilot Tom Marshburn to monitor the spacecraft during the dynamic launch and re-entry phases of flight.
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.
Matthias is the second European to fly on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The first was ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet who flew as part of Crew-2.
Visit the Cosmic Kiss mission page for more information about Matthias’s mission.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has set its sights on the starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82), a small but mighty environment that features rapid star formation. By looking closer with Webb’s sensitive infrared capabilities, a team of scientists is getting to the very core of the galaxy, gaining a better understanding of how it is forming stars and how this extreme activity is affecting the galaxy as a whole.
An international team of astronomers has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to survey the starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82). Located 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, this galaxy is relatively compact in size but hosts a frenzy of star formation activity. For comparison, M82 is sprouting new stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way galaxy.
The team directed Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument toward the starburst galaxy’s centre, obtaining a closer look at the physical conditions that foster the formation of new stars.
“M82 has garnered a variety of observations over the years because it can be considered as the prototypical starburst galaxy,” said Alberto Bolatto, lead author of the study. “Both Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have observed this target. With Webb’s size and resolution, we can look at this star-forming galaxy and see all of this beautiful new detail.”
Star formation continues to maintain a sense of mystery because it is shrouded by curtains of dust and gas, creating an obstacle to observing this process. Fortunately, Webb’s ability to peer in the infrared is an asset in navigating these murky conditions. Additionally, these NIRCam images of the very centre of the starburst were obtained using an instrument mode that prevented the very bright source from overwhelming the detector.
While dark brown tendrils of dust are threaded throughout M82’s glowing white core even in this infrared view, Webb’s NIRCam has revealed a level of detail that has historically been obscured. Looking closer toward the centre, small specks depicted in green denote concentrated areas of iron, most of which are supernova remnants. Small patches that appear red signify regions where molecular hydrogen is being lit up by the radiation from a nearby young star.
“This image shows the power of Webb,” said Rebecca Levy, second author of the study, at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Every single white dot in this image is either a star or a star cluster. We can start to distinguish all of these tiny point sources, which enables us to acquire an accurate count of all the star clusters in this galaxy.”
Looking at M82 in slightly longer infrared wavelengths, clumpy tendrils represented in red can be seen extending above and below the plane of the galaxy. These gaseous streamers are a galactic wind rushing out from the core of the starburst.
One area of focus for this research team was understanding how this galactic wind, which is caused by the rapid rate of star formation and subsequent supernovae, is being launched and influencing its surrounding environment. By resolving a central section of M82, scientists have been able to examine where the wind originates, and gain insight into how hot and cold components interact within the wind.
Webb’s NIRCam instrument was well suited to tracing the structure of the galactic wind via emission from sooty chemical molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs can be considered as very small dust grains that survive in cooler temperatures but are destroyed in hot conditions.
Much to the team’s surprise, Webb’s view of the PAH emission highlights the galactic wind’s fine structure — an aspect previously unknown. Depicted as red filaments, the emission extends away from the central region where the heart of star formation is located. Another unanticipated find was the similarity between the structure of the PAH emission and that of the hot, ionised gas.
“It was unexpected to see the PAH emission resemble ionised gas,” said Bolatto. “PAHs are not supposed to live very long when exposed to such a strong radiation field, so perhaps they are being replenished all the time. It challenges our theories and shows us that further investigation is required.”
Webb’s observations of M82 in near-infrared light also spur further questions about star formation, some of which the team hopes to answer with additional data gathered with Webb, including that of another starburst galaxy. Two other papers from this team characterising the stellar clusters and correlations among wind components of M82 are almost finalised.
In the near future, the team will have spectroscopic observations of M82 from Webb ready for their analysis, as well as complementary large-scale images of the galaxy and its wind. Spectral data will help astronomers determine accurate ages for the star clusters and provide a sense of how long each phase of star formation lasts in a starburst galaxy environment. On a broader scale, inspecting the activity in galaxies like M82 can deepen astronomers’ understanding of the early Universe.
“With these amazing Webb images, and our upcoming spectra, we can study how exactly the strong winds and shock fronts from young stars and supernovae can remove the very gas and dust from which new stars are forming,” said Torsten Böker of the European Space Agency, a co-author of the study. “A detailed understanding of this ‘feedback’ cycle is important for theories of how the early Universe evolved, because compact starbursts such as the one in M82 were very common at high redshift.”
These findings have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
More information
Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided 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. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.
Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
[Image description: Left: Messier 82 as imaged by Hubble. Hour-glass-shaped red plumes of gas are shooting outward from above and below a bright blue, disc-shaped centre of a galaxy. This galaxy is surrounded by many white stars and set against the black background of space. Right: A section of Messier 82 as imaged by Webb. An edge-on spiral starburst galaxy with a bright white, glowing core set against the black background of space. A white band of the edge-on disc extends from lower left to upper right. Dark brown tendrils of dust are scattered thinly along this band. Many clumpy, red filaments extend vertically above and below the plane of the galaxy.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Bolatto (UMD); CC BY 4.0
Technicians work underneath the European Service Module for NASA’s Orion spacecraft, September 2018.
ESA’s European service module will provide power, water, air and electricity to NASA’s Orion exploration spacecraft that will eventually fly beyond the Moon with astronauts. The European Service Module is now complete for Orion’s first mission that will do a lunar fly-by without astronauts to demonstrate the spacecraft’s capabilities.
Much like closing the bonnet on a car, with the radiators in place technicians can no longer access the internals of the European service module, symbolically ending the assembly and integration of the module that will fly further into our Solar System than any other human-rated spacecraft has ever flown before.
Credits: ESA–A. Conigli
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captures the striking landscape surrounding the Waza National Park in Cameroon.
Zoom in to explore this image at its full 10 m resolution or click on the circles to learn more.
The Waza National Park lies in the most northern region of Cameroon extending between Chad to the east, and Nigeria in the west. The park, which covers an area of 1700 sq km, is only about 10 km from the border of each country.
Here, the Waza National Park is on the left side of the green area at the bottom of the image. It is the country’s most diverse wildlife reserve and is home to lions, elephants, giraffes, antelopes and numerous species of birds. It was declared a Unesco World Heritage biosphere reserve in 1979.
At its western perimeter lies the town of Waza, visible as a small, yellowish area flanked by green land on two sides.
The vast, green zone surrounding the park is the Logone floodplain, one of the numerous floodplains within the Lake Chad basin. The lush green in the image is the result of seasonal flooding of the Logone River, appearing as a winding brown line to the east of the plain, and flowing along the border between Cameroon and Chad.
The ecosystem of this territory is shaped by the cycle of dry and wet seasons. During rainy season, which lasts from mid-May to mid-October, the region is inundated, becoming a temporary wetland that sustains grasses, reeds and seasonal water bodies.
More than 100 000 people live in the area and rely on the timing and the extent of the flood for fishing, grazing and agriculture. Patches of agricultural fields are visible in the image, with the largest at the bottom, left of the Logone River.
This image was acquired in November 2024, when the floodwaters usually start receding, leaving the area green and fertile. Evidence of the coming dry season is already visible: while the park conserves natural vegetation, nearby lands shift towards post-harvest stubble or fallow fields, appearing in brown hues.
On the right, the Chari River, Lake Chad’s principal tributary, appears green. It joins the Logone River to the north, before eventually flowing into Lake Chad (not pictured) further north. At the confluence between Chari and Logone lies N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad, visible as a large grey area at the top of the image.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2024), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO