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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
Omega Centauri is the largest cluster in the Milky Way, with a mass a million times that of our Sun. During Einstein Probe’s first months in space, observations of the well-known cluster helped to test and calibrate the satellite’s imaging quality.
Binary systems comprising a star with a black hole or neutron star companion generate X-rays when material from the star falls onto its heavy companion. Many such systems call Omega Centauri their home, making it shine brightly in X-ray light. Einstein Probe’s Follow-Up X-ray Telescope observed the structure and core region of the globular cluster.
[Image description: The image is square but rotated 45 degrees on top of a black background and looks like hundreds of blue lights in a diamond shape. A handful of the light dots are bigger, magenta-coloured at their centre, and are located near the edges of the image. Centrally, there are smaller light dots close together creating a brighter centre of the image.]
Credits: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Ariane 6 launches to the sky on 9 July 2024.
Europe’s newest heavy-lift rocket, it is designed to provide great power and flexibility at a lower cost than its predecessors. The launcher’s configuration – with an upgraded main stage, a choice of either two or four powerful boosters and a new restartable upper stage – will provide Europe with greater efficiency and possibility as it can launch multiple missions into different orbits on a single flight, while its upper stage will deorbit itself at the end of mission.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
ESA’s Aeolus satellite ready for liftoff on a Vega rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Using revolutionary laser technology, Aeolus will measure winds around the globe and play a key role in our quest to better understand the workings of our atmosphere. Importantly, this novel mission will also improve weather forecasting.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
After years of planning and countless hours of simulations, mission teams at ESA’s control centre in Germany are ready to take flight on the long and complex journey to Mercury.
Years of planning and preparation have lead to this moment, and teams at ESOC have been working closely with teams across the Agency, as well as the many colleagues at scientific institutions, in European industry, and of course our mission partners at the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA).
BepiColombo — Europe’s first-ever mission to the innermost planet of our Solar System — will take seven years, travel nine billion km, and will use nine planetary flybys to reach its volatile destination, and it could not be in more experienced hands.
After completing months of simulations, culminating in the the final ‘dress-rehearsal’ on Wednesday, mission teams came together for the pre-launch briefing to confirm the status of all ground systems, ground stations and team readiness.
All systems are GO for launch at ESOC — Europe’s gateway to space.
Live coverage starts at 03:15 CEST, Saturday 20 October, at esa.int/live.
Credits: ESA
This image shows the landscape in and around Greeley crater, a degraded impact crater in the southern highlands of Mars.
This plan view is a mosaic of data acquired by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express over 16 of the spacecraft’s orbits (0430, 1910, 1932, 2412, 2467, 2478, 4306, 4317, 4328, 6556, 8613, 8620, 8708, 12835, 14719, 16778). The ground resolution is about 100 m/pixel and the images cover a part of the martian surface ranging from 2°W to 9°E / 31.5° to 43.5°S. North is up.
This colour image was created using data from the nadir channel, the field of view which is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and the camera’s colour channels.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Rollout to the launch pad of the Soyuz rocket with the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft inside, 4 June 2018. The spacecraft will launch ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst into space alongside NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Roscosmos commander Sergei Prokopyev from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 6 June.
The 50-m tall Soyuz rocket will propell the astronauts to their cruising speed of around 28 800 km/h. Within 10 minutes of rising from the pad, the trio travelled over 1640 km and gained 210 km altitude. Every second for nine minutes, their spacecraft accelerated 50 km/h on average.
The rocket is rolled to the launch pad on a train, the astronauts are not allowed to see this part of the launch preparation – it is considered bad luck.
This will be Alexander’s second spaceflight, called Horizons. He will also be the second ESA astronaut to take over command of the International Space Station. The Horizons science programme is packed with European research: over 50 experiments will deliver benefits to people on Earth as well as prepare for future space exploration.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows the terrain surrounding Mars’s north pole. It captures the region where vast, rippling sand dunes meet the layers upon layers of dusty ice covering the planet’s pole.
Numerous labels have been placed across the terrain, highlighting features and regions of note. Be sure to click on these labels to explore the landscape in detail!
This image comprises data gathered by Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on 14 April 2023. It was created using data from the nadir channel, the field of view aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and the colour channels of the HRSC. North is to the right. The ground resolution is approximately 21 m/pixel and the image is centred at about 231°E/84°N.
[Image description: A rectangular slice of tan-coloured terrain shows a number of features on Mars: a rippling swathe of sand dunes to the left; two notable banks cutting down through the middle of the frame; two steep, semi-circular cliffs in the right-most third of the frame; and smooth terrain to the right. There are signs of layered ground throughout the frame, and the steep cliffs cast dark shadows onto the ground below. A handful of these features are marked by labels placed across the frame.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
After it's arrival at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of launch, the James Webb Space Telescope is unboxed inside a dedicated spacecraft preparation facility where it will be examined to ensure that it is undamaged from its voyage and in good working order.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG - P.Piron
Check our accessible text here.
Image description: Spacecraft, landers and rovers on the Moon.
Over 50 spacecraft have successfully launched from Earth to fly past, orbit, impact and land on the Moon.
19 landers and 7 rovers have visited the lunar surface.
The European Space Agency’s next hardware to land on the Moon is on the Russian Luna-25 lander.
#ForwardToTheMoon
Credits: ESA
Typically ESA’s shaker tables are used to replicate the take-off vibrations of a satellite-lifting rocket. The large object seen here is not a satellite at all but an 8-tonne cooling system being subjected to a simulated earthquake – while blasting a chilly wave of air towards the engineer observing the test.
Manufactured by Munters in Belgium, this mammoth 6 x 4 x 5 m cooling system is designed to remove heat from industrial-scale data centres while using just a fifth of the energy of traditional designs.
The system travelled three hours by road to ESA’s Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, for testing to prove it can carry on running even in the midst of an earthquake with a peak ground acceleration of 1G on 3 axes – equivalent to a violent Level IX earthquake, stronger than the Fukushima earthquake of 2011.
“To export to the Japanese market we have to satisfy very stringent seismic testing requirements,” says Craig MacFadyen of Munters. “We need to show the cooling system doesn’t fall to pieces and maintains its functionality during different grades of earthquakes.”
Testing was performed on ESA’s Hydra multi-axis hydraulic shaker, the Test Centre’s single most powerful shaker. See video of the testing here.
“Hydra’s hydraulic actuators move an 18-tonne shaker table in all three orthogonal axes simultaneously, in a similar fashion to an aircraft flight simulator,” explains Alexander Kuebler of ETS, the company operating the Test Centre for ESA.
“The motion of these actuators is overseen by a network of 36 parallel computers. The entire installation is braced by a seismic mass supported by springs and shock absorbers to prevent the resulting earthquake-strength vibrations spreading through the rest of the Test Centre. Up to 512 acceleration measurement channels can be used during testing, acquiring the maximum possible data for the customer.”
Hydra has served many of Europe’s largest space missions, including Envisat – at 8 tonnes the largest-ever civil Earth observation satellite – Herschel, and the Automated Transfer Vehicle, which weighed 22 tonnes at launch.
Hydra can also accommodate non-space customers when its schedule allows, such as the testing of generators for the underside of trains and an Airbus fuselage to simulate the stresses of approach and landing.
ESA’s Test Centre in the Netherlands is the largest facility of its kind in Europe, providing a complete suite of equipment for all aspects of satellite testing under a single roof.
Credits: ESA–G. Porter, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
SpaceX Crew-2 with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet arrive at NASA's Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on 16 April 2021.
French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet is returning to the International Space Station on his second spaceflight. The mission, which is called Alpha, will see the first European to launch on a US spacecraft in over a decade. Thomas is flying on the Crew Dragon, alongside NASA astronauts Megan MacArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide.
The Crew-2 launch is scheduled for 22 April at 11:11 BST/12:11 CEST.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
An artist's impression of the lunar outpost called the Gateway. The Gateway is the next structure to be launched by the partners of the International Space Station.
During the 2020s, it will be assembled and operated in the vicinity of the Moon, where it will move between different orbits and enable the most distant human space missions ever attempted.
Placed farther from Earth than the current Space Station – but not in a lunar orbit – the Gateway will offer a staging post for missions to the Moon and Mars.
Like a mountain refuge, it will provide shelter and a place to stock up on supplies for astronauts en route to more distant destinations. It will also offer a place to relay communications and can act as a base for scientific research.
The Gateway will weigh around 40 tonnes and will consist of a service module, a communications module, a connecting module, an airlock for spacewalks, a place for the astronauts to live and an operations station to command the Gateway’s robotic arm or rovers on the Moon. Astronauts will be able to occupy it for up to 90 days at a time.
A staging outpost near the Moon offers many advantages for space agencies. Most current rockets do not have the power to reach our satellite in one go but could reach the space Gateway. Europe’s Ariane would be able to deliver supplies for astronauts to collect and use for further missions deeper into space – much like mountain expeditions can stock up refuges with food and equipment for further climbs to the summit.
The Gateway also allows space agencies to test technologies such as electric propulsion where Earth’s gravity would interfere if done closer to home. New opportunities for space research away from Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere are planned for the outpost. Its close position will provide rapid response times for astronauts controlling rovers on the Moon.
Credits: ESA/NASA/ATG Medialab
Pangaea-X is a test campaign that brings together geology, high-tech survey equipment and space exploration. Astronauts, scientists, operations experts and instrumentation engineers work side-by-side to advance European know-how of integrated human and robotics mission operations.
An extension of ESA’s Pangaea geology training, the training involves working with the latest technologies in instrumentation, navigation, remote sensing, 3D imaging and geoscience equipment.
The Pangaea-X crew explores the barren and dry landscape of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, to prepare for the day when we set foot on other worlds. Known as the island of a thousand volcanoes, Lanzarote was chosen because of its geological similarity with Mars, such as a volcanic origin, mild sedimentary processes owing to a dry climate, hardly any vegetation and a well-preserved landscape.
Credits: ESA–S. Sechi
The team from OHB and ESA preparing the Hera asteroid mission for launch pose in front of the spacecraft in launch configuration - note the lack of 'red tag' items on its surface. This image was taken on 3 October 2024.
Credits: SpaceX
Europe’s newest rocket, Ariane 6, took flight for the second time from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 13:24 local time on 6 March (16:24 GMT, 17:24 CET).
This was the first commercial flight for Ariane 6, flight VA263, delivering the CSO-3 satellite to orbit. Arianespace was the operator and launch service provider for the French Procurement agency (DGA) and France’s space agency CNES on behalf of the French Air and Space Force’s Space Command (CDE).
During this second launch, all phases were successfully executed, including the Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU) reignition, the Vinci engine’s third boost and deorbiting of the upper stage.
Ariane 6 is Europe’s heavy launcher and a key element of ESA’s efforts to ensure autonomous access to space for Europe’s citizens. Its modular and versatile design allows it to launch all missions from low-Earth orbit into deep space. For this launch, the rocket was used in its two-booster configuration.
Shortly after liftoff and booster separation, the upper stage separated from the core stage. The upper stage engine then fired for the first time, taking Ariane 6 into an elliptical orbit travelling 300 km at its closest to Earth, and 600 km at its farthest from Earth, achieving the ‘chill-down’ and first ignition of the Vinci engine and of the Auxiliary Propulsion Unit. After a ‘coasting’ phase lasting 37 minutes, the engine fired up for a second time.
After Vinci’s second boost, the rocket’s passenger, a French satellite called CSO-3, was injected into Sun-Synchronous Orbit at an altitude of around 800 km. Spacecraft separation occurred one hour and six minutes after liftoff.
After the successful delivery of CSO-3, Ariane 6 demonstrated the full potential of its upper stage. The Auxiliary Propulsion Unit ignited as expected, and the Vinci engine’s third boost put the upper stage into a reentry orbit to safely burn up through Earth’s atmosphere, preventing accumulation of space debris. This confirms the full capability of Ariane 6.
Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja
ESA’s Euclid mission successfully passed tests to show that it can perform in the extreme environment of space.
At Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL) in Belgium, the payload module (containing the telescope and scientific instruments) was packed in a thermal tent, after which it was loaded in a large vacuum tank where it underwent intensive testing.
Euclid experienced simulated space conditions in vacuum with the payload module cooled to -150oC, the same temperature it will operate in once in space.
After 60 days of intensive testing, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, the vacuum chamber was opened and Euclid was taken out of the thermal tent.
Credits: ESA
This captivating image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 shows a lonely dwarf galaxy, a staggering 100 million light-years away from Earth. This image depicts the blue compact dwarf galaxy ESO 338-4, which can be found in the constellation of Corona Australis (the Southern Crown).
Blue compact dwarf galaxies take their name from the intensely blue star-forming regions that are often found within their cores. One such region can be seen embedded in ESO 338-4, which is populated with bright young stars voraciously consuming hydrogen. These massive stars are doomed to a short existence, as despite their vast supplies of hydrogen fuel. The nuclear reactions in the cores of these stars will burn through these supplies in only millions of years — a mere blink of an eye in astronomical terms.
The young blue stars nestled within a cloud of dust and gas in the centre of this image are the result of a recent galaxy merger between a wandering galaxy and ESO 388-4. This galactic interaction disrupted the clouds of gas and dust surrounding ESO 338-4 and led to the rapid formation of a new population of stars.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, CC BY 4.0
Sometimes the key to innovation is staying simple. Italian tech company D-Orbit applied this principle to their winning product submitted to last year’s Space Exploration Masterst.
The competition encourages ideas to solve some of the space industry’s main challenges while fostering products and services with commercial potential.
In the case of D-Orbit’s Fenix propulsion system, the idea was both simple and small. The pen-sized booster prototype, is just 10 cm long and 2 cm wide – allowing small satellites to work smarter and explore farther.
The 10 x 10 x 10 cm CubeSats are deployed directly into orbit from space. They currently have no propulsion system to change orbit or deorbit at the end of their missions. With the FENIX, CubeSats could be employed for longer missions farther out in space.
Each of the four boosters is packed with solid propellant that provides thrust which is triggered by a simple electrical ignition system. The boosters can be configured at each corner of the CubeSat or doubled up on either side. Thanks to their lightweight and compact size, they do not take up much instrument space.
With space exploration opening for business, technologies like Fenix have the potential to expand our horizons farther out in space. CubeSats can take on more sophisticated missions if they can manoeuvre in orbits – such as studying the Moon and asteroids from different angles.
In low Earth orbit, the boosters can deorbit the CubeSats at the end of their missions to help reduce space debris.
D-Orbit won a four-month ticket to test their prototype on the newly-installed ICE Cubes facility in the Columbus module of the International Space Station. The team will test the booster’s safe ignition mechanism inside an ICE cube experiment unit, without firing the actual propulsion system, to ensure that it works and is safe under space conditions.
Sensors and cameras will record the sparks, triggered by an electrical impulse, and the team can observe the testing anytime, anywhere, thanks to ICE Cubes dedicated control centre providing continuous remote access for users on ground. Fenix is set for launch to the Space Station by the end of next year.
Do you have an idea with commercial potential that could innovate space exploration? Submit it to the Space Exploration Masters challenge.
This year ESA is partnering with the United Nations World Health Organisation to target health and food. Problem-solvers are invited to come up with ideas and applications that promote nutritious food and food security on- and off-planet. Other challenges include using resources in space to make missions more sustainable and new ways to use future spacecraft.
Deadline for submissions is 31 July. Winners will be announced at the Space for Inspiration conference in Bilbao 29-31 October. More information and how to apply can be found here.
Credits: D-Orbit
Ariane 6 stands tall at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, how's before it takes flight for the first time. With the protective nine-story mobile gantry building now rolled back to reveal the new rocket, fuelling will soon begin. In the background, 19 km from the Centre Spatiale Guyanais (CSG), is the 15-metre Kourou antenna.
Ariane 6 is Europe’s newest heavy-lift rocket, designed to provide great power and flexibility at a lower cost than its predecessors. The launcher’s configuration – with an upgraded main stage, a choice of either two or four powerful boosters and a new restartable upper stage – will provide Europe with greater efficiency and possibility as it can launch multiple missions into different orbits on a single flight, while its upper stage will deorbit itself at the end of mission.
Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja
ESA astronaut candidate Raphaël Liégeois from Belgium during a robotics session as part of his basic astronaut training at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre, near Cologne, Germany.
The first building block of International Space Station robotics training in the curriculum of ESA’s 2022 astronaut candidate class is called GRAVI-T training.
During this session, they delve into generic robotic training, focusing on learning how to manipulate the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
Robotic arms on the Station are used to grab and berth cargo vessels such as Japan’s HTV and the Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus. They can also help astronauts during spacewalks by moving an astronaut strapped to the end of the arm to hard-to-reach places on the outside of the International Space Station. It can even replace a spacewalk altogether.
Under the supervision of instructors at the Astronaut Centre, the candidates use the Dynamic Skills Trainer, a console training tool, to operate the robotic arm within a simulated environment.
In addition, the astronaut candidates undergo virtual reality sessions to gain a better understanding of the 17-metre-long robotic arm's operations aboard the Station.
ESA’s newest class of astronauts, including Sophie Adenot, Rosemary Coogan, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Marco Sieber, and Raphaël, commenced basic astronaut training in April 2023. The group was selected in November 2022.
The one-year training provides an overall familiarisation and training in various areas, such as spacecraft systems, spacewalking, flight engineering, robotics and life support systems. They go through survival and medical training before receiving ESA astronaut certification in spring this year.
After certification, they will move on to the next phases of pre-assignment and mission-specific training, paving the way for future missions to the International Space Station and beyond.
Credits: ESA
Pangaea-X is a test campaign that brings together geology, high-tech survey equipment and space exploration. Astronauts, scientists, operations experts and instrumentation engineers work side-by-side to advance European know-how of integrated human and robotics mission operations.
An extension of ESA’s Pangaea geology training, the training involves working with the latest technologies in instrumentation, navigation, remote sensing, 3D imaging and geoscience equipment.
The Pangaea-X crew explores the barren and dry landscape of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, to prepare for the day when we set foot on other worlds. Known as the island of a thousand volcanoes, Lanzarote was chosen because of its geological similarity with Mars, such as a volcanic origin, mild sedimentary processes owing to a dry climate, hardly any vegetation and a well-preserved landscape.
Credits: ESA–A. Romeo
Rainer Kresken, Flight Dynamics, ESA astronomy missions during the ILA Public Days.
In the Space Pavilion at the Berlin Air and Space Show, a joint exhibition of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Industries Association (BDLI), 28 and 29 April 2018.
Credits: ESA–M. Pedoussaut, 2018
BepiColombo, with its two science orbiters, is set to build on the achievements of NASA’s Messenger mission, to provide the best understanding of the Solar System’s innermost planet to date.
This graphic highlights select Messenger discoveries, and indicates how BepiColombo will follow up.
Credits: ESA
ESA's astronaut class of 2022 including Sophie Adenot, Rosemary Coogan, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Raphaël Liégeois, Marco Sieber, and Australian Space Agency's Katherine Bennell-Pegg during their graduation ceremony at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre on 22 April 2024. Receiving certification marks their transition from candidates to fully qualified astronauts eligible for space missions. Selected in November 2022, the group began their training in April 2023. Basic astronaut training covers spacecraft systems, spacewalks, flight engineering, robotics, life support systems, survival, and medical training, followed by pre-assignment and mission-specific training, setting the stage for future missions to the International Space Station and beyond.
Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot
Gaia’s Early Data Release 3 was made public on 3 December 2020. It contains detailed information on more than 1.8 billion sources, as measured by the Gaia spacecraft. This represents an increase of more than 100 million sources over the previous data release (Gaia DR2), which was made public in April 2018. Gaia EDR3 also contains colour information for around 1.5 billion sources, an increase of about 200 million sources over Gaia DR2. As well as including more sources, the general accuracy and precision of the measurements has also improved.
Gaia EDR3 includes:
● 1 811 709 771 sources with positions to provide the best ever sky map
● 1 467 744 818 sources with parallax and proper motion to reveal their distances and motions
● 1 806 254 432 sources with the measurement of their brightness in white light
● 1 542 033 472 sources with the brightness of the objects in blue light
● 1 554 997 939 sources with the brightness of the objects in red light (a comparison of the blue and the red light provides information of the temperature of the object)
● 1 614 173 extragalactic sources to provide a reference frame for measuring ‘absolute’ positions and motions.
Credits: ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Engineers seen preparing a test inside the largest vacuum chamber of the ESA Propulsion Laboratory – this CORONA test facility measures 2 m in height and 5 m in length – to evaluate a compact electric propulsion design tailored for microsatellites and CubeSats.
Electric propulsion involves accelerating propellant via various electrical or magnetic methods to reach high levels of efficiency – propellant can be ejected up to 20 times faster than a traditional thruster.
Electric propulsion can only take place in vacuum conditions however, so test chambers are equipped with powerful pumps to evacuate all air, along with coolers to freeze the remainder.
Electrostatic probes, mass spectrometers and gas analysers can be used to assess thruster plume characteristics and divergence. Shield-like beam targets and plume diffusers are deployed to prevent potential damage to vacuum chambers from higher-power engines.
Based at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands, the ISO 9001-certified ESA Propulsion Lab is also equipped to test cold gas thrusters and liquid flow and sloshing in engines, tanks and piping.
The Lab’s objectives include end-to-end testing of CubeSat propulsion systems, accelerating development and testing of new small electric and green-chemical propulsion, developing fluid dynamics and propulsion simulation tools via test validation and increasing the competences and training of the coming generation of propulsion engineers.
The ESA Propulsion Lab prioritises testing for ESA projects but is also available for commercial testing serving ESA Member States companies. Click here for more information
Credits: ESA-Remedia
This image shows the Aquila Rift star-forming complex, 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.)
The Aquila Rift is a region that spans the constellations of Aquila and Serpens and contains the Aquila Rift cloud complex. This harbours the Serpens star-forming region, a part of which is shown in this image, which has widespread filaments.
The bright area towards the left is a network of filaments contains the Westerhout 40 (W40) star forming region. W40 contains both massive and low-mass stars, and the ionising radiation from the newly formed massive stars has created a so-called H II region, which is a cloud of partially ionised hydrogen gas. Around 520 young stars are located in W40. The bright area visible on the right of the image is the young star MWC 297, which powers the diffuse nebula Sh 2-62 around it.
Credits: ESA/Herschel/Planck; J. D. Soler, MPIA
What goes up, nearly always comes back down. When it comes to the objects we send to space, atmospheric reentries are actually a fundamental tool in minimising the creation of space debris and ensuring a sustainable future in space.
Objects in low-Earth orbit, affected by the 'drag' forces caused by Earth's atmosphere, gradually lower in altitude and then make a rapid and fiery descent towards Earth.
Small objects disintegrate as they reenter due to the immense friction and heat created, but parts of larger bodies can reach the ground so should be controlled to land over uninhabited regions.
Join Stijn Lemmens and Jorge del Rio Vera to find out more about why this matters in the joint ESA-UN podcast that narrates this infographic.
Credits: ESA / UNOOSA
Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, ESA project astronaut and the first Polish astronaut of the new generation to fly to space, is continuing a cherished tradition at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany. As he prepares for the upcoming Ignis mission, Sławosz is planting his astronaut tree—an enduring symbol of his connection to Earth before he journeys beyond it. During the ceremony, he was joined by Frank De Winne, Head of the European Astronaut Centre, Group Leader for Low Earth Orbit Exploration and former ESA astronaut, who offered a helping hand with the planting.
The Ignis mission, named after the Latin word for ‘fire,’ represents the spark igniting a new era in Poland’s space endeavours. The symbolism of fire and flight is also reflected in the American sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) tree chosen for each astronaut. In autumn, its leaves turn a vivid red and orange, mirroring the fiery tail of a rocket at launch—a powerful image that resonates with both the Ignis mission patch and the very essence of space exploration.
Sławosz was selected as an ESA astronaut reserve member in 2022 and became a project astronaut in 2023. Now assigned to Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4), he is undergoing intensive training with his crew mates before the expected launch no earlier than May 2025.
His flight, sponsored by the Polish government and supported by ESA, will carry out an ambitious programme of scientific and technological experiments for Poland and all of Europe.
The astronaut tree-planting tradition at EAC has its roots in the long-standing human spaceflight custom of planting trees before launch. ESA astronauts from the 2009 and 2022 classes who have flown missions have followed this ritual, and today, Sławosz continues the tradition in Cologne.
With his tree standing among those of preceding ESA astronauts, Sławosz’s Ignis tree burns bright in spirit, symbolising the strength, resilience and international collaboration that define human spaceflight. As it grows, it will serve as a lasting tribute to his journey and the knowledge he will bring back to Earth.
Credits: ESA - A.Conigli
These four crucial hardware units are built to endure spaceflight conditions but never leave the ground. Together they form the thermal data acquisition system of the largest thermal vacuum chamber in Europe, the Large Space Simulator.
Featuring a Sun simulator that reproduces unfiltered sunshine, the mammoth LSS chamber allows entire satellites to be operated in the equivalent illumination, vacuum and temperature conditions of space for weeks on end.
Known as NgDCUs, New Generation Data Collection Units, these rarely glimpsed boxes are normally fitted into the equipment bay of the motion simulator within the LSS. This is used to rotate a satellite being tested within the cylindrical test chamber, which at 15 m high and 10 m wide is big enough to accommodate an upended London double decker bus.
Currently undergoing their biennial calibration process to make sure their accuracy remains well within specification, the NgDCUs are used to gather thermal data from within a satellite during each test campaign.
The cables that extend from each unit are connected to thermocouples and other sensors embedded within the test satellite. Each unit fits seven data cards within up acquiring test data across a maximum 54 channels, adding up to more than 1500 channels overall. These internal thermal measurements are supplemented by optical and thermal cameras mounted within the LSS.
“For typical test chambers, this kind of acquisition system would be operated outside vacuum,” explains electronics engineer Koen Debeule of ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre. “But because these units need to rotate along with the test satellite they have to be built to withstand sustained hard vacuum and temperature swings. Being built to flight quality in this way really makes them unique.”
Hardware for the NgDCUs came from Syderal in Switzerland with software supplied by Terma in the Netherlands.
Based at the ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the LSS has performed pre-flight testing for many of ESA’s biggest missions, including Rosetta, Juice and Plato. The chamber incorporates a Sun simulator with up to 19 IMAX cinema-class Xenon light bulbs and liquid or gaseous nitrogen shrouds lining its walls to reproduce the chill of space.
The Test Centre is operated for ESA by European Test Services. It is the largest facility of its kind in Europe, providing a complete suite of equipment for all aspects of satellite testing under a single roof.
Credits: ESA-SJM Photography
This summer, a team of robots explored a simulated martian landscape in Germany, remotely guided by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. This marked the fourth and final session of the Surface Avatar experiment, a collaboration between ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to develop how astronauts can control robotic teams to perform complex tasks on the Moon and Mars.
The session introduced new levels of autonomy and complexity. NASA astronaut Jonny Kim operated two robots – ESA’s four-legged Spot and DLR’s humanoid Rollin’ Justin – to retrieve scattered sample containers and deliver them to a lander. Spot navigated the terrain autonomously, while Justin was guided through a mix of direct control and pre-set commands. This setup allowed Jonny to delegate tasks and focus on higher-level decisions, building on other sessions where robots required full teleoperation.
In a second scenario, ESA’s Interact rover transported DLR’s robot dog Bert to a cave entrance. After removing a boulder, Jonny deployed Bert, which then simulated a malfunction in one of its legs. Jonny had to retrain Bert’s walking algorithm in real time before it continued into the cave and detected signs of martian ice. This tested how operators respond to unexpected challenges and adapt robotic systems on the fly.
The robots are controlled from the International Space Station using a custom-built interface developed by ESA and DLR, combining a joystick and a haptic-feedback device. The interface allows switching between first-person view for immersive teleoperation and a top-down map for broader mission oversight. This flexibility lets the astronaut manage multiple robots efficiently, balancing direct control with strategic delegation.
Over four sessions, the Surface Avatar team has refined its approach to human-robot interaction, improving both teleoperation and task delegation to autonomous systems. The experiment has also helped to identify which tasks astronauts prefer to control directly and which can be safely handed over to robotic systems, offering valuable insight for future mission planning.
Read our blog to find out more.
Credits: ESA
This image of star cluster IC 348, captured by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument, shows compass arrows, a scale bar, and a colour key for reference.
The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).
The scale bar is labelled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. (It takes 0.1 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the scale bar.) One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion km. The field of view shown in this image is approximately 0.5 light-years across and 0.8 light-years high.
This image shows invisible near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colours. The colour key shows which NIRCam filters were used when collecting the light. The colour of each filter name is the visible light colour used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.
[Image description: An image showing wispy pink-purple filaments and a scattering of stars. At the bottom left are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The north arrow points in the 11 o’clock direction. The east arrow points toward 8 o’clock. Below the image is a colour key showing which filters were used to create the image and which visible-light colour is assigned to each infrared-light filter. From left to right, Webb NIRCam filters are F277W (blue), F360M (green), and F444W (red). A scale bar at the lower right of the image is about one-fifth the total width of the image, and text below it reads 0.1 light-years.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and K. Luhman and C. Alves de Oliveira (Penn State University)
The 11th annual ESA Open Day at ESA’s technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, took place on the weekend of 1 and 2 October 2022. On 1 October, visitors with disabilities had the opportunity to follow the tour at their own pace. On both days visitors were able to meet astronauts, space scientists and engineers and learn all about the work carried out at Europe’s largest space establishment.
Credits: G. Porter
A Proba-V view of the internationally protected, volcanic archipelago of the Galápagos and its surrounding marine reserve. This island chain is renowned for its many endemic species that were studied by Charles Darwin, directly contributing to his famous theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
In 1535, the Spaniard Tomás de Berlanga, fourth bishop of Panama, first visited these islands by chance when he was sailing to Peru. On the maps of Mercator and Ortelius, famous geographers, the islands were named Insulae de los Galopegos or Islands of the Tortoises after the giant tortoises found there.
This false colour composition highlights vegetation in red on the flanks of several volcanoes, in particular Wolf, Darwin, Alcedo, Santo Tomás and Cerro Azul volcanoes on Isla Isabella, the largest island.
Launched on 7 May 2013, Proba-V is a miniaturised ESA satellite tasked with a full-scale mission: to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days.
Its main camera’s continent-spanning 2250 km swath width collects light in the blue, red, near-infrared and mid-infrared wavebands at a 300 m pixel size, down to 100 m in its central field of view.
VITO Remote Sensing in Belgium processes and then distributes Proba-V data to users worldwide. An online image gallery highlights some of the mission’s most striking images so far, including views of storms, fires and deforestation.
This 100 m spatial resolution image was acquired on 27 February 2017.
Credits: ESA/Belspo – produced by VITO
Inauguration of the Paris Space Hub by the Prime Minister of France François Bayrou on the first day of the International Paris Air Show, 16 June 2025.
Learn more about Le Bourget 2025 here.
Credits: ESA - P. Servent
This picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts the starburst galaxy NGC 5253, observed by two of Hubble’s instruments across a span of ten years.
At the bottom is a wide view of the galaxy, comprising data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) using the Wide Field Channel, as well as the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Here the dense clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy are in full view, illuminated by bright and hot star clusters, at the centre of a vast array of stars. You can view this image in more detail here.
Above is a more detailed shot, obtained using the High Resolution Channel (HRC) of the ACS instrument. The pullout shows which region of the galaxy was captured by HRC. This focused image was used to study super star clusters in the dust-filled core of the galaxy. See the full image here.
[Image Description: A collage of two images of a dwarf galaxy. At bottom, the entire galaxy is seen against a dark background. A white box marks an area of the galaxy’s core, and a pullout connects this to the image above, which shows that area brightly and in more detail.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Zezas, W. D. Vacca, D. Calzetti; CC BY 4.0
ESA’s Aeolus satellite ready for liftoff on a Vega rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Using revolutionary laser technology, Aeolus will measure winds around the globe and play a key role in our quest to better understand the workings of our atmosphere. Importantly, this novel mission will also improve weather forecasting.
Credits: ESA - M. Pedoussaut
Thousands flocked to ESAC, ESA's astronomy heart nearby Madrid, Spain on Saturday 19 October to celebrate the ESA Open Day.
People got the chance to meet astronaut Thomas Reiter, space experts and saw behind the scenes of Europe’s space adventure where space science comes alive.
Credits: Bärbel and Peter Kretschmar
One of the sessions at Living Planet Symposium focused on human adaptability to extreme environments. The discussion was triggered by the different experiences of the three speakers: ESA Astronaut Luca Parmitano, ESA CryoSat Mission Geophysicist Alessandro di Bella and Omar Di Felice, an extreme cyclist. All three have lived or worked in very difficult, albeit different, environments.
Credits: ESA/JürgenMai
The full disc image below shows a map of magnetic propertied for the whole Sun based on data from the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) on ESA’s Solar Orbiter. Taken on 18 June 2020, there is a large magnetically active region in the lower right-hand quadrant of the Sun.
Credits: Solar Orbiter/PHI Team/ESA & NASA
Copernicus Sentinel-1C standing proud on its payload adapter between the two fairing halves that will protect the spacecraft on the launch pad and on its ascent towards space.
Sentinel-1C, the third satellite in the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, is set to launch in December 2024 on a Vega-C rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.
Credits: ESA - M. Pédoussaut
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst during his last week of training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA. Alexander reviewed the main tasks he has to perform during his mission. His training started two years ago and has moved from general maintenance classes to specific tasks related to the Horizons mission.
Among these tasks are work on the airlock, the replacement of umbilical equipment for Extra Vehicular Activities (EVAs), testing of tools, review of experiments, making repairs and checking the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module.
Alexander will be launched on 6 June with US astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev from the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan in the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft. Soyuz MS-09 will be the 138th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft.
The mission is called Horizons to evoke exploring our Universe, looking far beyond our planet and broadening our knowledge. His first mission was called Blue Dot. Alexander will take over command of the International Space Station for the second half of his mission. This is only the second time that a European astronaut will take up this leading position on the space outpost – the first was ESA astronaut Frank De Winne in 2009. Alexander Gerst is the 11th German citizen to fly into space.
The science programme is packed with European research: more than 50 experiments will deliver benefits to people back on Earth and prepare for future space exploration.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This colour-coded topographic image of Mars shows Arcadia Planitia in Mars’s northern lowlands.
It was created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on 10 November 2024 (orbit 26333) and is based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. Lower parts of the surface are shown in blues and purples, while higher altitude regions show up in whites and reds, as indicated on the scale to the top right.
North is to the right. The ground resolution is approximately 18 m/pixel and the image is centred at about 41°N/211°E.
[Image description: A topographical satellite map of a landscape with varied elevation and colour gradients. The left side of the image is dominated by blue and purple hues, suggesting lower elevations, while the right side transitions into green and tan colours, indicating higher ground. There is a distinct circular feature in the lower right quadrant that resembles an impact crater. The boundary between the blue/purple area and the green/tan area is irregular, possibly representing a cliff, or escarpment.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, this image shows the narrow strait that connects eastern Europe to western Asia: the Bosphorus in northwest Turkey. The image contains satellite data stitched together from three radar scans acquired on 2 June, 8 July and 13 August 2018.
Separating the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, the strait is one of the busiest maritime passages in the world, with around 48 000 ships passing through every year. Daily traffic includes international commercial shipping vessels and oil tankers, as well as local fishing and ferries. Ships in the strait can be seen in the image as multi-coloured dots. Three bridges are also visible spanning the strait and connecting the two continents.
The two identical Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites carry radar instruments, which can see through clouds and rain, and in the dark, to image Earth’s surface below. The multi-temporal remote sensing technique combines two or more radar images over the same area to detect changes occurring between acquisitions.
In the far-left of this image, the aqua-green patches of land show the changes in the fields between the three satellite acquisitions.
Turkey’s most populous city, Istanbul, can be seen on both sides of the Bosphorus. The city appears in shades of white owing to the stronger reflection of the radar signal from buildings, which contrasts with the dark black colour of the inland lakes and surrounding waters.
This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The BepiColombo spacecraft stack is prepared for transport for mounting in 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 - M. Pedoussaut
The Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite takes us over South Sudan. Having gained independence from Sudan in July 2011, South Sudan is the youngest country in the world. It has an estimated population of 13 million people, more than 80% of whom live in rural areas. Most of the population relies on farming, fishing or herding to meet their food and income needs.
The Sobat river is traced in a vibrant green colour along the left part of the image. This is the most southerly of the great eastern tributaries of the White Nile, the section of the Nile between Malakal, South Sudan and Khartoum, Sudan.
Tropical forests, swamps and grassland make up the majority of South Sudan’s terrain. A large, swampy area called the Sudd, which is about 320 km wide and 400 km long, can be found in the centre of the country. This is thought to be one of the largest freshwater ecosystems in the world and is fed by the White Nile and rainfall runoff from surrounding areas. It is home to large fish populations, millions of migratory birds, and various endangered species.
The area has also provided shelter for refugees fleeing the ongoing Sudanese civil war, which broke out in South Sudan in December 2013.
The red and gold in the lower-central part of the image shows smoke from a fire. The smoke is being driven by a northerly wind. The black parts of the image, similarly, show burnt areas of land – possibly the result of slash and burn agriculture. By burning dry grass, herders are able to fertilise the soil with ash, promoting new growth that can be used to feed livestock. Subsistence farmers also tend to use this method to manage land, returning nutrients to the soil and clearing the ground of unwanted plants in the process. Some of the negative longer-term impacts of this practice include air pollution, deforestation and erosion.
Sentinel-2 carries an innovative wide swath high-resolution multispectral imager for observing our land and vegetation. The mission mainly provides information for agricultural and forestry practices and for helping manage food security.
This image, which was captured on 18 January 2018, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018), processed by ESA,CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
In preparation for his Beyond mission, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA, in March 2019.
His training included working on a spacewalk, or Extravehicular Activity (EVA).
Luca already has two spacewalks under his belt but in ‘building 9’ of the Johnson Space Center, Luca worked with the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility and refreshed his skills on maintaining the US spacewalk suits called Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU).
The training is important as Luca has some spacewalks planned that will see him repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02 particle detector. The dark-matter hunter was launched 16 May 2011 on Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134. It records over 17 billion cosmic rays, particles, and nuclei a year. The results from AMS-02 have shown unexpected phenomena not predicted by cosmic ray models—and changing our understanding of the cosmos.
The mission was initially meant to run for only three years but has been so successful that its mission life has been extended. Three of the four cooling pumps however have stopped functioning and require repair.
A series of spacewalks are planned to replace the cooling system for the $2 billion instrument but they were never designed to be replaced in space.
The first spacewalk is intended to determine just how and where to intervene, and what tools will be needed for the process.
Luca will go beyond Earth’s atmosphere when he returns to the International Space Station in 2019 as part of Expedition 60/61, alongside NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Roscosmos astronaut Alexander Skvortsov.
Luca was the first of the 2009 astronaut class to fly to the Space Station. His first mission Volare, meaning 'to fly' in Italian, took place in 2013 and lasted 166 days, during which time Luca conducted two spacewalks and many experiments that are still running today.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
What are you like at docking a virtual spacecraft with a space station? And, more importantly, how does this change over 60 days lying in bed?
This image shows a participant in the current ESA-NASA bedrest study at the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) :envihab facility in Cologne, Germany.
Wearing a virtual reality headset and using joystick controllers, she is attempting to dock a spacecraft as part of a simulation that will be repeated at regular intervals throughout her 60 days in bed.
Bedrest has long been used to mimic some of the changes our bodies experience in the weightlessness of space. Participants lie in beds with the head end tilted 6° below horizontal and must ensure one shoulder is touching the mattress at all times.
As blood flows to the participants’ heads and muscle is lost from underuse, researchers use activities such as the docking simulation to better understand the physical and cognitive effects of microgravity-like conditions. They then test techniques to try and combat these effects, from diet to physical exercise.
This bedrest study is the first of its kind to be conducted in partnership between ESA and NASA. It is also the first to employ DLR’s short-arm centrifuge as a way of recreating different gravity levels for participants.
Once a day, a selection of the study’s participants will lie in DLR’s short-arm centrifuge where they will be spun to encourage blood to flow back towards their feet. This will allow researchers to better understand the potential of artificial gravity in mitigating the effects of weightlessness on human bodies.
Credits: DLR