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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 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
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
Since 13 September 2018, the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board ESA’s Mars Express has been observing the evolution of a curious cloud formation that appears regularly in the vicinity of the 20 km-high Arsia Mons volcano, close to the planet’s equator. The cloud can be seen in this VMC image taken 10 October as the white, elongated feature extending 1500 km westward of the volcano.
A view of the region with labels is provided here.
Follow the development of this cloud via the daily images sent by the Visual Monitoring Camera on Mars Express.
More information: Mars Express keeps an eye on curious cloud.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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
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
NASA astronaut Drew Morgan, Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Skvortsov and ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano in the tailor-made Sokol spacesuits they will wear in the Soyuz spacecraft while travelling to and from the International Space Station. These suits are is intended to provide life support and protection in case of a sudden loss of pressure inside the spacecraft.
Credits: ESA/NASA/Roscosmos
Post-flight news conference at ESA's European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany. From left to right: Walther Pelzer, Director General of the German Space Agency at DLR, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, ESA Director for Human and Robotic Exploration David Parker.
Credits: ESA
Ministers from ESA’s Member States, along with Associate Member Slovenia and Cooperating State Canada, gathered in Seville, Spain, 27-28 November 2019, to discuss future space activities for Europe and the budget of Europe’s space agency for the next three years.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This image shows examples of galaxies in different shapes, all captured by Euclid during its first observations of the Deep Field areas.
As part of the data release, a detailed catalogue of more than 380 000 galaxies was published, which have been classified according to features such as spiral arms, central bars, and tidal tails that infer merging galaxies.
[Image description: A collage of nine by five squares containing galaxies of many different shapes and viewed in different orientations. For example, the first column shows five edge-on galaxies, which appear thin like a pencil. The galaxies in the second column have a more fuzzy, diffuse appearance. The middle columns showcase face-on spiral galaxies with many different shapes and densities of stars. The last two columns include interacting galaxies or galaxies with an unusual spiral arm or tidal tail.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by M. Walmsley, M. Huertas-Company, J.-C. Cuillandre; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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Image description: A rocket launches from Earth towards the Moon.
The time to get from Earth to the Moon depends on the trajectory and propulsion system of the spacecraft.
Apollo missions took about three days to reach the Moon.
The quickest trip was NASA’s New Horizons mission – it flew past the Moon in just 8 hours and 35 minutes on its way to Pluto.
The European Space Agency’s first mission to the Moon, SMART-1, was the second spacecraft to use ion thrust technology. It took one year to reach the Moon using solar-electric propulsion.
#ForwardToTheMoon
Credits: ESA
ESA’s Euclid satellite departs from Thales Alenia Space’s plant in Cannes in a carefully monitored container, carried by an exceptional convoy truck. The satellite headed over to the port of Savona, Italy, then boarded a ship that is taking it to the port near its launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The ship is expected to reach its destination at the beginning of May, getting ready for launch no earlier than this July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, USA.
Euclid will travel 1.5 million km from Earth, in the opposite direction to the Sun, to the Lagrange point L2. From there, ESA's Euclid mission will begin the detective work of exploring the dark Universe.
Euclid will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe ever. It will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. With this map, Euclid will reveal how the Universe has expanded and how large-scale structure has evolved over cosmic history. And from this, we can learn more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Credits: Thales Alenia Space / ImagIn
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 - S.Corvaja
This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. Flying over Mercury's north pole gave the spacecraft's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters.
M-CAM 1 took this long-exposure photograph of Mercury's north pole at 07:07 CET, when the spacecraft was about 787 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet's night side at 06:59 CET.
In this view, Mercury’s terminator, the boundary between day and night, divides the planet in two. Along the terminator, just to the left of the solar array, the sunlit rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer can be seen, including some of their central peaks.
Because Mercury’s spin axis is almost exactly perpendicular to the planet's movement around the Sun, the rims of these craters cast permanent shadows on their floors. This makes these unlit craters some of the coldest places in the Solar System, despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun!
Excitingly, there is already evidence that these dark craters contain frozen water. Whether there is really water on Mercury is one of the key mysteries that BepiColombo will investigate once it's in orbit around the planet.
The left of the image shows the vast volcanic plains known as Borealis Planitia. These are Mercury’s largest expanse of ‘smooth plains' and were formed by the widespread eruption of runny lava 3.7 billion years ago.
This lava flooded existing craters, as is clearly visible in the lower left Henri and Lismer craters. The ‘wrinkles’ seen in the centre-left were formed over billions of years following the solidification of the lava, probably in response to global contraction as Mercury’s interior cooled down.
The volume of lava making up Borealis Planitia is similar in scale to mass extinction-level volcanic events recorded in Earth’s history, notably the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago.
The foreground of the image shows BepiColombo's solar array (centre right), and a part of the Mercury Transfer Module (lower left).
[Technical details: This image of Mercury's surface was taken by M-CAM 1 on board the Mercury Transfer Module (part of the BepiColombo spacecraft), using an integration time of 40 milliseconds. Taken from around 787 km, the surface resolution in this photograph is around 730 m/pixel.]
[Image description: Planet Mercury in the background with its grey, cratered, pockmarked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.]
Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
European Service Module-2 wiring at the Airbus integration hall in Bremen, Germany.
The structure is complete and over 11 km of cables are being meticulously placed in preparation for the computers and equipment that will keep astronauts alive and well for the second Orion mission called Exploration Mission-2.
Up to four astronauts will fly Orion to 70 000 km beyond the Moon before completing a lunar flyby and returning to Earth. The mission can take a minimum of 8 days and will collect valuable flight test data.
Credits: ESA–A. Conigli
In time for its summer launch this year, Ariane 6 has arrived at the port of Pariacabo in Kourou, French Guiana – home of Europe’s Spaceport – and is ready to be assembled.
All the elements that make up the rocket are manufactured in mainland Europe and then transported by this novel ship, Canopée (canopy in French). It is the first custom-built transporter to use sails, reducing emissions and saving on fuel by up to 30%, and on this trip, it has travelled for 10 days covering over 7000 km.
The hybrid-propulsion vessel is 121 m long and has 37 m tall sails. Canopée rotates continuously between stop-offs to load each Ariane 6 stage and other parts and ship them across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe’s spaceport.
On this trip, Canopée brings the central core for Ariane 6’s first flight. Having collected the upper stage from Bremen, Germany, Canopée moved on to Le Havre, France, to load the main stage of Ariane 6.
The next-generation cargo ship has been designed for ArianeGroup to meet the complex requirements of Ariane 6 transport – the stages and engines of Ariane 6 are high-tech equipment that require delicate care during transport.
Canopée’s structure is tailored to carry large, fragile loads as well as navigate the shallow Kourou river to Pariacabo harbour. From here the various Ariane 6 components are offloaded and transported by road to the new Ariane 6 launch vehicle assembly building just a few kilometres away.
Here, the launcher stages are unpacked and installed on the assembly line for integration, and finally, liftoff.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Arianegroup/Optique Vidéo du CSG - S. Martin
Use red-green or red-blue glasses to best enjoy this image of an approaching dust storm captured by ESA’s Mars Express in April this year. Its vertical structure is particularly emphasized in this anaglyph view.
The image was derived from data acquired by the nadir channel and the stereo channels on board Mars Express. The ground resolution is approximately 16 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 78°N/106°E.
Colour image and more information
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This stereoscopic image of Mars shows the Arcadia Planitia region of Mars. It was generated from data captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter on 10 November 2024 (orbit 26333). The anaglyph offers a three-dimensional view when viewed using red-green or red-blue glasses.
[Image description: Grey-scale anaglyph image of the Arcadia Planitia region of Mars. When used with red-green/blue 3D glasses the image provides a three-dimensional view of the landscape, providing a sense of depth while viewing the crater.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
What do you know about the Moon? This set of infographics illustrates the most frequently asked questions and facts about Earth’s natural satellite.
ESA is teaming up with international partners to explore the Moon as a destination for both robotic missions and human explorers.
Orion, the NASA spacecraft, will bring humans farther than they have ever been before relying on the European Service Module to return humans to the Moon and take advantage of the new technology for human space transportation. ESA is providing service modules that will provide propulsion, life support, power, air and water, and control the temperature in the crew module.
Luna-Resurs is a partnership with the Russian agency Roscosmos that will carry European technology to land precisely and safely on the Moon and to drill into the surface to extract and analyse samples of the lunar terrain.
The Agency is looking at how we could extract and process local resources into useful products and services, such as drinkable water or breathable oxygen on the Moon.
The Heracles mission could take of in 2028 to allow us to gain knowledge on human-robotic interaction while landing a spacecraft on the Moon to collect samples with a rover operated from an orbiting lunar gateway and send the samples back to Earth.
Credits: ESA
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
As of 1 March 2021, ESA has a new Director General: Dr Josef Aschbacher, who has taken up duty at ESA Headquarters in Paris, France.
The ESA Council appointed Dr Aschbacher in December 2020 as the next Director General of ESA, for a period of four years. He succeeds Prof. Jan Wörner, whose term of office ended in February 2021.
Dr Aschbacher was previously ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes and Head of ESRIN, ESA’s centre for Earth Observation near Rome.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
With the launch of the Biomass satellite approaching, the Vega-C rocket fairing has been adorned with the mission sticker. Biomass is scheduled for liftoff on 29 April 2025 on Vega-C flight VV26 from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Once in orbit and commissioned, Biomass mission will play a key role in delivering novel information about the state of our forests, how they are changing over time, and advance our knowledge of the 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.
Credits: ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE/Optique vidéo du CSG–S. Martin
This colour-coded topographic view shows Lowell crater on Mars.
Lower parts of the surface are shown in blue and purple hues, while higher altitude regions show up in whites, yellows, and reds, as indicated on the scale to the top right. This view is based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived.
It comprises data obtained by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera during orbits 2640, 2662, 2684, 16895, 18910, 18977, and 18984. The ground resolution is approximately 50 m/pixel and the images cover a region from 274.5° to 283° East and 49° to 54.5° South. North is up.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Fully loaded with solid fuel, the P120C rocket motor common to Europe’s future launchers Vega-C and Ariane 6 was moved from the integration building and transferred to the test stand at the beginning of June 2018, to prepare for its first hot firing at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The P120C is 13.5 m long and 3.4 m in diameter, contains 142 tonnes of solid propellant and is the largest-ever solid rocket motor built in one piece.
Credits: CNES
An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to discover gravitationally bound star clusters when the Universe was 460 million years old. This is the first discovery of star clusters in an infant galaxy less than 500 million years after the Big Bang.
Young galaxies in the early Universe underwent significant burst phases of star formation, generating substantial amounts of generating substantial amounts of powerful ultraviolet light. However, because of how far away they are from Earth, studying how many stars they contain has proven challenging. Using Webb, an international team of astronomers have now detected five young massive star clusters in the Cosmic Gems arc (SPT0615-JD1), a strongly-lensed galaxy emitting light when the Universe was roughly 460 million years old, looking back across 97% of cosmic time.
The Cosmic Gems arc was initially discovered in NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images obtained by the RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) programme of the lensing galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746.
With Webb, the science team can now see where stars formed and how they are distributed, in a similar way to how the Hubble Space Telescope is used to study local galaxies. Webb’s view provides a unique opportunity to study star formation and the inner workings of infant galaxies at such an unprecedented distance.
[Image description: This image shows two panels. On the right is field of many galaxies on the black background of space, known as the galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746. On the left is a callout image from a portion of this galaxy cluster showing two distinct lensed galaxies. The Cosmic Gems arc is shown with several galaxy clusters.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Bradley (STScI), A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the Cosmic Spring collaboration; CC BY 4.0
An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to discover gravitationally bound star clusters when the Universe was 460 million years old. This is the first discovery of star clusters in an infant galaxy less than 500 million years after the Big Bang.
Young galaxies in the early Universe underwent significant burst phases of star formation, generating substantial amounts of powerful ultraviolet light. However, because of how far away they are from Earth, studying how many stars they contain has proven challenging. Using Webb, an international team of astronomers have now detected five young massive star clusters in the Cosmic Gems arc (SPT0615-JD1), a strongly-lensed galaxy emitting light when the Universe was roughly 460 million years old, looking back across 97% of cosmic time.
The Cosmic Gems arc was initially discovered in NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images obtained by the RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) programme of the lensing galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746.
With Webb, the science team can now see where stars formed and how they are distributed, in a similar way to how the Hubble Space Telescope is used to study local galaxies. Webb’s view provides a unique opportunity to study star formation and the inner workings of infant galaxies at such an unprecedented distance.
[Image description: A field of galaxies on the black background of space. In the middle is a collection of dozens of yellowish galaxies that form a foreground galaxy cluster. Among them are distorted linear features, which mostly appear to follow invisible concentric circles curving around the centre of the image. The linear features are created when the light of a background galaxy is bent and magnified through gravitational lensing. A variety of brightly coloured, red and blue galaxies of various shapes are scattered across the image, making it feel densely populated.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Bradley (STScI), A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the Cosmic Spring collaboration; CC BY 4.0
The hot firing model of the Ariane 6 upper stage has been installed on the P5.2 test bench at the DLR German Aerospace Center in Lampoldshausen, Germany.
After arrival from the ArianeGroup facilities in Bremen, this 5.4 m-diameter upper stage was hoisted out of its container, tilted vertical and installed on the test stand.
The upper stage will now undergo a campaign of tests to simulate all aspects of flight including stage preparation such as fuelling with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen and draining its tanks.
In tests lasting about 18 hours each, data will be gathered on non-propulsive ballistic phases, tank pressurisation to increase performance, Vinci engine reignitions, exhaust nozzle manoeuvres, ending with passivation where all remaining internal energy is removed.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This panoramic view of our Milky Way in X-ray light was taken as part of the calibration and test campaign of Einstein Probe in space. During this test observation lasting more than 11 hours, the satellite detected various celestial objects that generate X-rays. Each object is captured as a purple cross due to the way the spacecraft’s novel lobster-eye optics work. The X-ray observations are shown on top of an optical image of the Milky Way created by European Southern Observatory ground-based telescopes.
Einstein Probe’s Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) consists of twelve modules that cover more than 3600 square degrees of the sky. The satellite can capture the full night sky in three orbits around Earth. While monitoring the sky, the mission will spot X-rays from powerful events like supernovas, material falling into black holes or even colliding neutron stars. The Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT) can subsequently zoom in on these objects and provide more detailed information.
[Image description: An image of the Milky Way galaxy. The background is dark with a slightly brighter band spanning form left to right, overlayed with a darker cloud-like structure. On top of this background roughly twenty purple crosses stand out. They are plus sign shaped and have a bright dot in the middle. One of the crosses is much brighter than the others and located in the upper part of the image. On top of the background and observation crosses, is a grid of squares.]
Credits: EPSC, NAO/CAS; DSS; ESO
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst arrived at Cologne airport on the evening of 20 December 2018. He had landed on Earth for the second time earlier in the morning together with NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Prokopiev. Their Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft landed in the steppe of Kazakhstan at 05:02 GMT (11:02 local time). The landing concluded Alexander’s Horizons mission that saw him take over command of the International Space Station during Expedition 57.
The trio’s landing in the Kazakh steppe marked the successful conclusion of over six months in space during which Alexander conducted over 60 European experiments, became the second ever European commander of the International Space Station, welcomed six resupply vehicles, installed the first commercial facility for research in the Columbus laboratory, delivered an important message on climate change for leaders at the COP24 climate change conference, captured real-time footage of a Soyuz launch abort and much, much more.
Horizons was Alexander’s second mission to the International Space Station – the first was Blue Dot in 2014.
Alexander will take his time to readapt to Earth’s gravity supported by ESA’s team of space medicine experts at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. He will also continue to provide ground-based data for researchers to support experiments performed in space.
Credits: ESA–P. Sebirot
Astronauts Panel with German astronauts Matthias Maurer, Thomas Reiter and Reinhold Ewald, as well as DLR's Claudia Stern.
ESA joined the Space Pavilion at ILA 2022 to present the newest programmes, missions and technologies at the heart of Europe’s space effort. The Pavilion also highlights upcoming commercial opportunities in the space sector for German, European and global industry focussing on sustainability and climate change, digitalization, innovation, research and space safety.
Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot
The BepiColombo spacecraft stack mounted on the launcher.
BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter is seen at the top of the stack, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter is in the middle, and ESA’s Mercury Transfer Module is at the bottom.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique video du CSG – JM Guillon
Before proceeding with encapsulation, the team needs to make sure that the clearance between the satellite and the fairing is ok.
The Copernicus Sentinel-3B satellite will be carried into orbit on a Rockot launcher.
Once safely in orbit and fully commissioned, this new satellite will begin its mission to map Earth’s oceans and land surfaces with its powerful optical and radar systems. The Sentinel-3 mission is set to play a key role in the world’s largest environmental monitoring programme – Copernicus.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
A cosmic question mark appears amid a powerful gravitational lens in the James Webb Space Telescope’s wide-field view of the galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154. Gravitational lensing occurs when something is so massive, like this galaxy cluster, that it warps the fabric of space-time itself, creating a natural funhouse-mirror effect that also magnifies galaxies behind it.
The rarely seen type of lensing captured here, which astronomers term hyperbolic umbilic, created five repeated images of one galaxy pair. The red, elongated member of this pair traces the familiar shape of a question mark across the sky due to the distortion, with another unrelated galaxy happening to be in just the right space-time to appear like the question mark’s dot – especially for humans who love to recognize familiar shapes and patterns.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, V. Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary’s University); CC BY 4.0
There is a science treasure waiting to be picked up on Mars. Some 330 million km away from Earth, 23 titanium tubes containing samples of martian rock and dust are waiting to be collected. While NASA’s Perseverance rover is hard at work scouting the Red Planet, European engineers are working to perfect the robotic arm that would collect the tubes and insert them on a rocket for the trip back home.
The image shows a prototype mastering the pickup of a tube from a sandy surface. The robotic arm uses its jaws to grip the target from various angles and positions, firmly but with caution so as not to damage the precious load. Inside the tube, the real samples on Mars weigh a few grams and are about the size of a piece of classroom chalk.
This model is the first hardware developed to consolidate the design of the Sample Transfer Arm, a 2.5 metre-long robot that will load the sample tubes into a lander for delivery towards Earth.
The “hand” of ESA’s robotic arm, or end effector, is designed to pick up tubes either from the rover or from the ground. The robot uses a replica of the hermetically sealed sample tubes that the Perseverance rover is leaving on Mars. These cylinders are called RSTA, short for Returnable Sample Tube Assembly. Beyond the acronym, to most people on Earth they look like… lightsabres.
At the Added Value Solutions (AVS) facilities in Gipuzkoa, Spain, the challenge was for the arm to master its close grip on a tube lying on the ground. For this pickup operation the arm uses two fingers that grip the tube tightly. A closing mechanism avoids excessive forces that could damage the tube.
As with many missions in space, there are contingency plans in place. In the best scenario, Perseverance reaches the lander and offers the tubes, ready for direct pick-up by the Sample Transfer Arm. This operation involves an additional mechanism: a plunger to extract the tube from the rover and move it around safely, to then insert it into an orbiting sample container that will be returned to Earth.
The backup scenario foresees two Ingenuity-like helicopters collecting the tubes from a depot – the first sample depot on another world – and dropping them in front of the lander. This is exactly what is being trained for at AVS, picking up tubes from the ground.
Watch a video of the action and see more images of the tests on ESA’s To Mars and Back blog.
This European technology is part of the Mars Sample Return campaign, a joint effort by NASA and ESA set to be the first to deliver scientifically selected samples from the Red Planet to Earth in the 2030s. Once safely back on Earth, the unique samples will undergo extensive analysis in the world’s best laboratories using state-of-the-art equipment and techniques.
Credits: AVS
Solar Orbiter is scheduled to launch on an Atlas V 411 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA, at 05:15 CET on 8 February 2020 (23:15 EST on 7 February).
Gravity assist manoeuvres at Earth and Venus will enable the spacecraft to change inclination to observe the Sun from different perspectives. During the initial cruise phase, which lasts until November 2021, Solar Orbiter will perform two gravity-assist manoeuvres around Venus and one around Earth to alter the spacecraft’s trajectory, guiding it towards the innermost regions of the Solar System. At the same time, Solar Orbiter will acquire in situ data and characterise and calibrate its remote-sensing instruments. The first close solar pass will take place in 2022 at around a third of Earth’s distance from the Sun.
The spacecraft’s orbit has been chosen to be ‘in resonance’ with Venus, which means that it will return to the planet’s vicinity every few orbits and can again use the planet’s gravity to alter or tilt its orbit. Initially Solar Orbiter will be confined to the same plane as the planets, but each encounter of Venus will increase its orbital inclination. For example, after the 2025 Venus encounter it will make its first solar pass at 17º inclination, increasing to 33º during a proposed mission extension phase, bringing even more of the polar regions into direct view.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. Its mission is to perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun and from high-latitudes, providing the first images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun, and investigating the Sun-Earth connection. Data from the spacecraft’s suite of ten instruments will provide unprecedented insight into how our parent star works in terms of the 11-year solar cycle, and how we can better predict periods of stormy space weather.
Credits: ESA-S.Poletti
Satellite navigation has changed our lives, triggering a quiet revolution in our society and economy.
Credits: ESA
Copernicus Sentinel-5’s cutting-edge spectrometer is integrated into the MetOp Second Generation A-type weather satellites.
Operating in a polar orbit, Sentinel-5 delivers daily global data on atmospheric gases and aerosols. Sentinel-5 observations include key air pollutants, essential climate variables, and stratospheric ozone that protects us from ultraviolet radiation.
The instrument is seen here at the cleanroom at the Airbus facilities in Toulouse, France. Its white panels are visible under plastic sheeting at the fore of the satellite, half way up the vertical stack.
Credits: ESA - S.Corvaja
In a decade’s time, an exciting new visitor will enter the Jovian system: ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice. As its name suggests, the mission will explore Jupiter and three of its largest moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – to investigate the giant planet’s cosmic family and gas giant planets in general.
Juice is planned for launch in 2022, and its instruments are currently being perfected and calibrated so they are ready to start work once in space. This image shows one of the many elements involved in this calibration process: a miniature gold-plated metallic model of Juice used to test the spacecraft’s antennas.
Juice will carry multiple antennas to detect radio waves in the Jupiter system. These antennas will measure the characteristics of the incoming waves, including the direction in which they are moving and their degree of polarisation, and then use this information to trace the waves back to their sources. In order to do this, the antennas must work well regardless of their orientation to any incoming waves – and so scientists must figure out and correct for the antennas’ so-called ‘directional dependence’.
This shiny model was used to perform a set of tests on Juice’s Radio and Plasma Wave Instrument (RPWI) last year. It was submerged in a tank filled with water; an even electric field was then applied to the tank, and the model was moved and rotated with respect to this field. The results revealed how the antennas will receive radio waves that stream in from different directions and orientations with respect to the spacecraft, and will enable the instrument to be calibrated to be as effective as possible in its measurements of Jupiter and its moons.
Similar tests, which are technically referred to as rheometry, were conducted in the past for spacecraft including the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn (which operated at Saturn between 2004 and 2017), NASA’s Juno spacecraft (currently in orbit around Jupiter), and ESA’s Solar Orbiter (scheduled for launch in early 2020 to investigate the Sun up close).
The test performed for Juice posed a few additional hurdles – the model’s antennas were especially small and needed to be fixed accurately onto the model’s boom, which required scientists to create a special device to adjust not only the antennas, but also the boom itself.
The model was produced at a 1:40 scale, making each antenna 62.5 millimetres long from tip to tip; scaled up, the antennas will be 2.5 metres long on Juice. The main spacecraft parts modelled here include the body of the probe itself, its solar panels, and its antennas and booms. The model has an overall ‘wingspan’ of 75 centimetres across its solar panels. The photo also shows a spacecraft stand, which extends out of the bottom of the frame. The gold coating ensured that the model had excellent electric conducting properties, and reacted minimally with the surrounding water and air during the measurements.
Meanwhile, the assembly of the Juice flight model has started in September, with the delivery of the spacecraft's primary structure, followed by integration of the propulsion system.
More information: Juice begins to take shape
This model of Juice was built by the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and the tests were performed by the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute in Graz, Austria, as part of a project financed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The lead scientist for the calibration effort was Georg Fischer of the Space Research Institute, also using computer simulations performed by Mykhaylo Panchenko.
Credits: G. Fischer/IWF Graz
This image shows the galaxy EGSY8p7, a bright galaxy in the early Universe where light emission is seen from, among other things, excited hydrogen atoms — Lyman-α emission. The galaxy was identified in a field of young galaxies studied by Webb in the CEERS survey. In the bottom two panels, Webb’s high sensitivity picks out this distant galaxy along with its two companion galaxies, where previous observations saw only one larger galaxy in its place.
This discovery of a cluster of interacting galaxies sheds light on the mystery of why the hydrogen emission from EGSY8p7, shrouded in neutral gas formed after the Big Bang, should be visible at all. Astronomers have concluded that the intense star-forming activity within these interacting galaxies energised hydrogen emission and cleared swathes of gas from their surroundings, allowing the unexpected hydrogen emission to escape.
This graphic is assembled from multiple images captured by Webb’s NIRCam instrument as part of the CEERS survey. The close-up view of EGSY8p7 was newly processed for this image, making use of NIRCam data captured with seven different near-infrared filters.
[Image Description: A graphic with three images. The top image, labelled “CEERS survey”, shows many square images of stars and galaxies, stitched together according to their locations in the sky. One square is highlighted, and a cutout on the bottom left shows it enlarged, labelled “Webb/ NIRCam”. A tiny spot is shown zoomed-in to the right, labelled “EGSY8p7” with a scale marker of “0.5 arcsec”. Here it can be seen that the spot is three neighbouring galaxies, appearing as coloured blobs with bright, distinct cores.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, S. Finkelstein (UT Austin), M. Bagley (UT Austin), R. Larson (UT Austin), A. Pagan (STScI), C. Witten, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)
The MetOp Second Generation weather satellite's structural and thermal model - a prototype version specially made for testing - being unloaded from its transport lorry at the ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands on 6 June 2019, arriving for a full-scale test campaign.
Credits: ESA/ETS
In July 2025, the Smile spacecraft was removed from the Large Space Simulator at ESA’s technical heart, ESTEC, where it had been undergoing thermal tests.
This manoeuvre required a lot of work and patience to install the lifting device that slowly picks up the spacecraft and moves it out of the chamber. The Large Space Simulator is Europe’s largest vacuum chamber. It is used to ensure that spacecraft are ready for the tough conditions of space – making it crucial to lift spacecraft in and out very carefully.
Read more about the final stages of the Smile test campaign
Smile (the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
[Image description: A large circular opening frames the view upward into a bright room. Suspended from a yellow overhead crane is a shiny, gold-coloured spacecraft, hanging by red straps and surrounded by cables. The perspective is from inside a dark chamber looking up at the equipment above.]
Credits: ESA-M.Roos
This image of a rugged part of Mercury’s surface was captured by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 4 September 2024 as the spacecraft sped by for its fourth of six gravity assist manoeuvres at the planet.
It was captured at 23:57 CEST by the Mercury Transfer Module’s monitoring camera 2 (M-CAM 2), just three minutes after closest approach, when the spacecraft was only about 885 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 165 km took place at 23:48 CEST.
The image reveals two ‘peak ring basins’, so-called due to their inner ring of peaks on an otherwise flattish floor. Vivaldi, named after the famous Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) measures 210 km across. Stoddart, newly named because it was deemed interesting for BepiColombo scientists in the future, measures 155 km across.
Also in the image are the Mercury Planetary Orbiter’s medium gain antenna (top centre) and magnetometer boom (right).
North is to the lower left.
More about BepiColombo's fourth Mercury flyby
[Image description: Planet Mercury in the background with its grey, cratered, pock-marked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.]
Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The fairing of the Soyuz launcher 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. Launch is scheduled for 18 December from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
In this photo, the upper composite of the launcher and all passengers are encapsulated in the fairing and the composite is ready for integration with the 3-stage launcher. The fairing sticker features, among others, the ESA and Cheops mission logos and the winning design of the Cheops fairing sticker competition, on the left, created by Denis Vrenko.
Credits: ESA - M. Pedoussaut