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ESA’s Vega-C rocket is complete on the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport and ready for liftoff, set for 4 December. The final element of the rocket, that includes the Sentinel-1C satellite that will be launched into space was installed on top of the 35-m launcher on 29 November – like a cherry on a cake.
On launch day, the first three Vega-C stages will fire, burn through their fuel and be expended in rapid succession, enabling the rocket to reach space in just eight minutes. The fourth stage with Sentinel-1C will orbit Earth and prepare for release an hour and fifty minutes after liftoff.
Although the components are stacked and ready on the launch pad, technicians are connecting, checking and testing right up until launch day. A final ‘launch readiness review’ will be held the day before liftoff, authorising Vega-C to be ignited and return to the skies.
Credits: ESA-Manuel Pedoussaut
When living on the Moon, there will be no such thing as rubbish. An ESA project has investigated a new method of 3D printing that could enable the reuse of scrap metal salvaged from old spacecraft or landers for the in-situ production of new high-performance parts.
To establish a viable lunar economy, future settlers will need to make use of all the resources at their disposal, including scrap metal. At the same time they will need to overcome environmental challenges – most notably the high probability that manufacturing processes will be contaminated by lunar dust.
Austrian additive manufacturing company Incus, specialising in Lithography-based Metal Manufacturing (LMM), worked with Lithoz GmbH and OHB on an ESA project to establish the feasibility of printing using recycled metal, while showing that a degree of contamination by lunar dust is a manageable problem.
LMM involves printing layers of metal powder in a binder that can be selectively hardened where required by exposure to light. The part is then shaken free of the leftover feedstock and ‘sintered’ or baked hard.
"This project has proven that LMM technology is able to use recycled powder for the feedstock material and provide sustainable zero-waste workflow," comments Incus CEO Gerald Mitteramskogler. "We expect that further developments in metal recycling technologies will open the way to metal materials with more settled sintering processes for the lunar environment."
The project used a combination of new and recycled titanium, plus up to 10% of simulated lunar dust by volume. Higher levels of dust contamination were shown to increase ‘viscosity’ (or runniness) of the feedstock but optimal powder to binder ratios could overcome this phenomenon to achieve the desired part quality, with strength comparable to conventional Metal Injection Molding parts.
Martina Meisnar, ESA’s technical officer for the project, adds: “Considering the challenge of bringing humans back to the Moon and building a base, the topic of in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) is gaining significant momentum. Projects like this, recently completed by Incus and project partners, demonstrate that manufacturing methods like LMM are very good candidates to support such an endeavour.”
“This successful collaboration showed that lithography-based AM techniques are among the most promising candidates to let 3D printing in space become a reality in the future,” notes Martin Schwentenwein, Head of Material Development at Lithoz.
Francesco Caltavituro, system engineer for the project at OHB: “Our work done so far, and our follow-up research and development, aims to continue to open the way towards a sustainable Moon settlement released from dependency on Earth.”
The 18-month research project was supported through ESA’s Technology Development Element.
Credits: Incus
With satellites delivering a mindboggling amount of data about our planet along with the availability of the latest digital technologies, there are countless opportunities for innovation. ESA’s ɸ-week, explores how this new world can be embraced to bring even more benefits to all.
These drawings were done live during the conference main sessions and capture the essence of what the future of Earth Observation might look like.
Credits: ESA / courtesy of Picturise
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
ESA's newly selected astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 arrived at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, on 3 April 2023 to begin their 12-month basic training.
The group of five candidates, Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber, are part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States in November 2022.
The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level of standards in preparation for future space missions. During basic training, this includes learning all about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space systems and operations, as well as spacewalk and survival training.
This image shows the candidate Sophie Adenot on her first day at the European Astronaut Centre, ready to embark on their journey to become certified ESA astronauts.
Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja
On 14 July, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch Chandrayaan-3 – a Moon mission featuring a lunar lander and a rover that will spend 14 days carrying out scientific activities on the surface.
In addition to ISRO’s own deep space communication antenna, the mission will rely on support from ground stations around the world, coordinated by ESA and NASA.
Communication is an essential part of every deep space mission. Ground stations on Earth keep operators safely connected to spacecraft as they venture into the unknowns and risks of space. Without ground station support, it’s impossible to get any data from a spacecraft, to know how it’s doing, to know if it is safe or even to know where it is.
ISRO operates a 32-metre deep space tracking station in India that enables it to locate, track, command and receive telemetry and scientific data from its distant spacecraft. But sometimes, ISRO’s operators need to track or command a spacecraft when it is outside the field of view of this antenna.
Building new giant antennas and control stations around the world is very expensive. So, like many space agencies and commercial companies across the globe, ISRO will receive support from the stations of partner organisations instead. Not only does this significantly reduces costs, but it also fosters international spaceflight collaboration.
Thanks to its global ‘Estrack’ network of deep space stations, ESA can help its partners track, command and receive data from spacecraft almost anywhere in the Solar System via its ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
ESA’s 15 m antenna in Kourou, French Guiana, will be used to track Chandrayaan-3 during the days after launch to help ensure that the spacecraft survived the rigours of lift off and is in good health as it begins its journey to the Moon.
As the spacecraft recedes from Earth, ESA will coordinate tracking support from the 32-metre antenna operated by Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd in the UK. Goonhilly will support Chandrayaan-3’s propulsion and lander modules. Crucially, it will support the lander during the entire phase of lunar surface operations, helping to ensure that science data acquired by the rover arrives safely with ISRO in India.
Data and telemetry sent back by Chandrayaan-3 arriving via Kourou and Goonhilly will first be forwarded to ESOC. From there, they will be sent to ISRO for analysis.
The two European stations will compliment support from NASA’s Deep Space Network and ISRO’s own stations to ensure the spacecraft’s operators never lose sight of their pioneering Moon craft.
Follow @esaoperations on Twitter for updates on ESA’s support to Chandrayaan-3.
Credits: ESA
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
This image shows an area of Euclid’s Deep Field South. The area is zoomed in 16 times compared to the large mosaic.
Many galaxies are visible in this field, all with different shapes and colours because they have different ages and distances.
[Image description: A sea of stars and galaxies sparkle against a black background. Several galaxies can be identified by their elongated shape and/or spiral arms. Some galaxies are seen edge-on while one prominent spiral galaxy at the bottom centre is seen face-on. At the far right, between the middle and top of the image, are some interacting galaxies. Galaxy clusters are also seen, in particular near bottom centre, where features smeared into arcs represent gravitational lensing. The brightest stars in the image have diffraction spikes.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
An unusual view of part of the BepiColombo spacecraft stack, taken by one of the monitoring cameras (or ‘selfie-cams’) fixed to the Mercury Transfer Module, MTM. The camera is looking up towards the solar array drive (top left) and the back side of the solar array closest to the ‘body’ of the spacecraft module. The image was taken in late September as part of launch preparations at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
MTM is equipped with three monitoring cameras, which provide black-and-white snapshots in 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution. One of the monitoring cameras is positioned on the MTM with a field of view as shown in this image, looking up towards the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), which sits above. The MTM’s solar arrays are currently folded for launch, resulting in the presented image, but after their deployment the camera will have a clearer view. In particular, the MPO’s high-gain antenna will be in the field of view of the camera around one day after launch.
The other two cameras are placed on the other side of the module: one will look down the extended solar array of the MTM, the other towards the MPO, capturing glimpses of the medium-gain antenna once deployed and, later, of the magnetometer boom. Click here for a diagram showing the positions and example fields of views of each of the cameras.
The actual deployment of the solar arrays and antenna will be confirmed by telemetry data sent by the spacecraft after launch (click here for a timeline of activities immediately following launch). Later, the monitoring cameras will be switched on. The first sets of images are planned to be taken around 12 hours and 1.5 days after launch, and returned to Earth shortly after.
The monitoring cameras will be used ad-hoc during the cruise phase, notably during the flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury.
While the MPO is equipped with a high-resolution scientific camera, this can only be operated after separating from the MTM upon arrival at Mercury in late 2025 because, like several of the 11 instrument suites, it is located on the side of the spacecraft fixed to the MTM during cruise. Nonetheless, it will be possible to operate or partially operate as many as eight of the 11 instruments on the MPO during the flybys, along with three of the five instrument packages onboard JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. This will afford some unique data collection opportunities at Venus, for example.
BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It is the first European mission to Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner Solar System, and the first to send two spacecraft to make complementary measurements of the planet’s dynamic environment at the same time.
Launch is scheduled for 01:45 GMT on 20 October. Check for updates and follow the launch live here. When available, images from the monitoring cameras will be published on our website, and on Twitter via @ESA_MTM in the first instance.
Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
As the COP30 climate conference gets underway in Brazil, the world’s attention is once again drawn to the plight of the Amazon – the planet’s largest and most vital rainforest. With the European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer Biomass satellite now in orbit, ESA is helping Brazil prepare to transform this new mission’s groundbreaking data into actionable knowledge for protecting the rainforest and confronting climate change.
Although the Biomass mission is still being commissioned, a side-by-side image reveals a section of Amazon rainforest. This image on shows the forest floor, while this image captures the canopy about 30 metres above the ground.
Credits: ESA/DLR/AreSys/Polimi
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for 17 hours between 26–28 November 2025.
3I/ATLAS is the first interstellar comet to have been imaged in X-ray light. Whether interstellar comets shine in X-rays as we are used to from comets originating within the Solar System, or whether they exhibit entirely different characteristics, has remained a long-standing mystery.
The X-ray image of the comet you see here was captured by XRISM’s soft X-ray telescope Xtend. The field of view covers a region of about 3 million km², revealing X-rays coming from a region of around 400 000 km around the comet nucleus. This could be caused by a diffuse cloud of gas surrounding the comet, although it requires further analysis.
XRISM’s X-ray image can be compared to that of the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, which also saw a diffuse X-ray glow around the comet.
These X-rays can come from the interaction of the solar wind with gases from the comet, such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide. Analysis of XRISM’s data from around the comet nucleus shows signs of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
Read the full XRISM web story here.
For the latest updates and FAQs related to comet 3I/ATLAS, go to our website
XRISM (pronounced krizz-em) is a mission led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in partnership with NASA and ESA. It carries two instruments: an X-ray calorimeter called Resolve capable of measuring the energy of individual X-ray photons to produce a spectrum at unprecedented level of ‘energy resolution’ (the capability of an instrument to distinguish the X-ray ‘colours’), and a large field-of-view X-ray CCD camera to image the surrounding field called Xtend.
[Image description: This image shows an X-ray view of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, captured by the JAXA-led XRISM spacecraft. Against a black background, purple-to-green blobs appear throughout the image. Around the centre-right of view, a larger, bright green blob stands out – this is the X-ray light coming from near the comet’s nucleus. A red arrow labelled “Sun direction” points left, and a yellow arrow labelled “comet motion” points to the right. At the bottom, a scale marker reads “38.5 arcmin ~ 3,000,000 km”, while a white circle labelled “r = 5 arcmin ~ 400,000 km” surrounds the bright comet blob.]
Credits: JAXA
Peering into the Universe beyond our galaxy, ESA’s Euclid will try to untangle the mysteries of the cosmic web to address five fundamental questions in cosmology:
- What is the structure and history of the cosmic web?
- What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?
- How has the expansion of the Universe changed over time?
- Is our understanding of gravity complete?
95% of the Universe appears to be made up of unknown “dark” matter and energy. Scientists estimate that dark matter makes up 25% of the Universe and dark energy 70%. Dark matter and energy affect the motion and distribution of visible sources, but do not emit, absorb or reflect any light. Scientists do not know yet what these entities actually are or whether our current understanding of how gravity behaves on the very large scale is completely correct. Revealing the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and testing the behaviour of gravity over the largest distances, are among the most compelling challenges of cosmology and fundamental physics today.
Euclid is ESA’s space telescope designed to explore the dark Universe. The mission will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe ever produced across 10 billion years of cosmic time. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how large-scale structure is distributed across space and time, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), 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
Sławosz Uznański began his training at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne on 1 September 2023. Over the past months, he has been diligently preparing for his future space mission . He is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station on Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) and is assigned as mission specialist under the command of Axiom Space’s Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson.
In April 2024, Sławosz joined his colleagues from the 2022 Astronaut Class in Bordeaux for a series of parabolic flights. These flights are an important part of astronaut training, allowing them to experience what microgravity feels like.
During a parabolic flight, a specially modified aircraft flies in a series of parabolic arcs. The plane climbs steeply, then dives down sharply, creating short periods of weightlessness inside the cabin. Each period of weightlessness lasts about 20 to 30 seconds and happens several times throughout the flight.
This training helps astronauts get used to the sensation of floating and performing tasks without gravity. By experiencing these conditions firsthand, they can better prepare for the challenges they’ll face when they are in space. For Sławosz and his fellow astronauts, it was a chance to practice moving and working in a microgravity environment before their actual missions.
Credits: ESA-A. Conigli
Overview of the integration activities in the S5 facility of Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, where the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft are undergoing launch preparations.
The mission consists of two science orbiters – the Japanese Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) and ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) – and the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), which will use solar electric propulsion to take the two orbiters to the Mercury, along with gravity assist flybys at Earth, Venus and Mercury itself.
BepiColombo is Europe's first mission to Mercury, due to launch this year on a journey the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our Solar System. When it arrives at Mercury in late 2025, it will endure temperatures in excess of 350 °C.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
Hera systems engineer Pedro Escorial prepares the Juventas CubeSat for electromagnetic compatibility testing alongside its Hera mothership in ESA’s Maxwell chamber, part of Hera’s pre-flight test campaign at ESA’s Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
Hera is ESA’s first mission for planetary defence. Due for launch in October 2024, Hera will fly to the Didymos binary asteroid system in deep space to perform a close-up survey of the Dimorphos moonlet in orbit around the primary body. The Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos is already historic, as the first Solar System object to have its orbit changed by human activity, by the 2022 impact of NASA’s DART mission.
Hera is intended to gather crucial missing data about Dimorphos for scientists, to turn DART’s grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique. To increase its yield of data, Hera carries with it ESA’s first deep space CubeSats, carrying additional instruments and planned to fly closer to the asteroid’s surface than the main spacecraft, before eventually landing.
Part of Hera’s testing was documented for the spacecraft team by photographer Max Alexander, who specialises in science communication through photography.
Credits: Max Alexander/ESA
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
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
ESA’s Euclid will orbit the second Lagrange point (L2), 1.5 million kilometres from Earth in the opposite direction to the Sun. L2 is an equilibrium point of the Sun-Earth system that follows Earth around the Sun.
In its orbit at L2, Euclid’s sunshield can always block the light from the Sun, Earth and Moon while pointing its telescope towards deep space, ensuring a high level of stability for its instruments.
At L2, Euclid joins ESA’s Gaia mission and the ESA/NASA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, which are also orbiting around this equilibrium point, each following well separated trajectories.
Euclid is ESA’s space telescope designed to explore the dark Universe. The mission will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe ever produced across 10 billion years of cosmic time. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how large-scale structure is distributed across space and time, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background. This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort.
On 7 June 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project ‘A Sign in Space’.
After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.
US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life.
Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open.
Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.
Could this sign of extraterrestrial intelligence be a recipe for destruction or a peaceful message? Are we ready for a first contact with an alien civilisation?
Join the community and contribute your ideas on the online Discord platform.
Credits: Ken and Keli Chaffin
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
Sentinel-3B's rocket fairing has been adorned with the mission sticker and signed. Now signed and sealed, just the delivery into orbit part remains. The Copernicus Sentinel-3B satellite is scheduled for liftoff on 25 April 2018. Its identical twin, Sentinel-3A, has been in orbit since February 2016. The two-satellite constellation offers optimum global coverage and data delivery for Europe’s Copernicus environment programme.
Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst reviews camera equipment during training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA ahead of his launch to the International Space Station.
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 astronaut is now in the last stages of training for his challenging mission. 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
After months of rigorous testing at Airbus facilities in Germany, the Copernicus Sentinel-2C satellite is ready to be placed in the transport container that will keep it safe during transit to the launch site.
Offering ‘colour vision’ for Europe’s environmental monitoring Copernicus programme, the Sentinel-2 mission combines high-resolution and novel multispectral capabilities to monitor Earth’s changing lands in unprecedented detail and accuracy. Information from this mission is helping to improve agricultural practices, monitor the world’s forest, detect pollution in lakes and coastal waters, and contribute to disaster mapping, to name a few.
Copernicus Sentinel-2C is scheduled to be launched in September 2024 on a Vega rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Credits: Airbus
NASA photo from the book “Keeping Up with The Astronauts 2” by Don Myrus (1963).
On May 5, 1961, Alan B. Shepard became the first American in space during a suborbital flight aboard his Mercury capsule named Freedom 7. Three weeks later, based on the success of Shepard's brief flight, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to achieving a lunar landing before the end of the decade.
(The U.S. put an astronaut on the moon on July 16, 1969, keeping President Kennedy's promise and winning the so-called "space race" with the Soviet Union.)
This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows Lowell crater on Mars.
It comprises data gathered 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.
This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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
Measurements gathered by the Copernicus Sentinel-5P mission between January and August 2018 have been averaged to reveal formaldehyde in the atmosphere. This map is based on ‘vertical column’ concentrations. This air pollutant is released into the atmosphere from forest fires and wood processing, for example. It is an important intermediate gas in the oxidation of methane and other hydrocarbons. While it is short-lived in the atmosphere, it reacts chemically to become a major source of carbon monoxide – another harmful pollutant.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus data (2018), processed by BIRA–IASB/DLR
As for other ESA missions, spacecraft data arrive at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Germany, via ground stations around the world.
Raw data are transmitted to the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Spain. From ESAC the data are distributed to the processing centres of the Science Ground Segment of the Euclid Consortium, based in a number of European states and the USA.
The Euclid Consortium (EC) is an organisation that brings together more than 2000 researchers in theoretical physics, astrophysics and space astronomy, and engineers, technicians, and administrative staff. It was selected by ESA as the single official scientific consortium having the responsibility of the scientific instruments, the production of the data and of leading the scientific exploitation of the mission until completion.
The EC Science Ground Segment is responsible for the design, development tests, integration and operation of the data processing tools, pipelines and data centres. The processed data products include calibrated images and spectra, catalogues of scientific measurements, and documentation.
At regular intervals, the treasure trove of Euclid’s processed data will be made publicly available to the community via the Astronomy Science Archive at ESAC. It is from ESAC that science operations are planned, and where all the scientific data produced by an ESA mission are archived and made accessible to the world.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
With satellites delivering a mindboggling amount of data about our planet along with the availability of the latest digital technologies, there are countless opportunities for innovation. ESA’s ɸ-week, explores how this new world can be embraced to bring even more benefits to all.
These drawings were done live during the conference main sessions and capture the essence of what the future of Earth Observation might look like.
Credits: ESA / courtesy of Picturise
Preparing Hera’s High Gain Antenna for electromagnetic compatibility testing in ESA’s Maxwell chamber, during its pre-flight test campaign at ESA’s Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. To the right is seen Hera’s ‘Asteroid Deck’, hosting its instruments, including its twin CubeSat Deep Space Deployers and two white-covered Asteroid Framing Cameras, bottom, with its black-wrapped Thermal Infrared Instrument in between the pair.
Hera is ESA’s first mission for planetary defence. Due for launch in October 2024, Hera will fly to the Didymos binary asteroid system in deep space to perform a close-up survey of the Dimorphos moonlet in orbit around the primary body. The Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos is already historic, as the first Solar System object to have its orbit changed by human activity, by the 2022 impact of NASA’s DART mission.
Hera is intended to gather crucial missing data about Dimorphos for scientists, to turn DART’s grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique. To increase its yield of data, Hera carries with it ESA’s first deep space CubeSats, carrying additional instruments and planned to fly closer to the asteroid’s surface than the main spacecraft, before eventually landing.
Part of Hera’s testing was documented for the spacecraft team by photographer Max Alexander, who specialises in science communication through photography.
Credits: Max Alexander/ESA
Suzie Imber, Associate Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Leicester, shows the participants from the audience and ESA astronaut Tim Peake, a powder experiment to explain how the X-ray spectrometer is able to detect X-rays coming from Mercury’s surface.
Credits: ESA
At Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, is being fitted into the flight adapter of the Soyuz-Fregat rocket that will lift it into space on 17 December.
In this picture, taken on 28 November, Cheops is hoisted above the conic flight adapter while the Airbus team is making sure the satellite orientation is correct before placing it on the flight adapter ring.
Cheops is ESA’s first mission dedicated to the study of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. It will observe bright stars that are already known to host planets, measuring minuscule brightness changes due to the planet’s transit across the star’s disc.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG/J Odang
These Copernicus Sentinel-2 images show two different views of the Strait of Messina in Italy, after a major dust storm from the Sahara desert passed over the area.
The image shows the strait on 20 June 2024. The suspended particles brought haze and poor air quality.
Copernicus Sentinel-2 comprises a constellation of two polar-orbiting satellites and monitors variability in land surface conditions. With its wide swath of 290 km, along with its short revisit time, Sentinel-2 allows rapid changes to be monitored.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2024), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
After being packed up in Germany, a long voyage to the US and then a month in storage, ESA’s EarthCARE satellite has been carefully lifted out of its transport container so that the team at the launch site can start getting it ready for its big day in May.
The satellite is designed to advance our understanding of the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting incident solar radiation back out to space and trapping infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface. It’s set of four state-of-the-art instruments will work together to yield new insight into Earth’s radiation balance against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
Credits: ESA
ESA’s Euclid will examine visible and infrared light from distant galaxies using two scientific instruments on board. These instruments will measure the accurate position and shapes of galaxies in visible light, and their redshift (from which their distance can be derived) in the infrared light. With these data, scientists can construct a 3D map of the distributions of both the galaxies and the dark matter in the Universe. The map will show how large-scale structure evolved over time, tracing the role of dark energy.
The VISible instrument (VIS) takes very sharp images of galaxies over a much larger fraction of sky than would be possible from the ground. These observations will be used to measure the shapes of over a billion galaxies.
As the name suggests, VIS collects visible light. It is sensitive to wavelengths from green (550 nanometres) up to near infrared (900 nm). The instrument uses a mosaic of 36 CCDs (Charge Coupled Devices, a type of camera sensor), each of which contains more than 4000 pixels by 4000 pixels. This gives the detector a total of about 600 megapixels, equivalent to almost seventy 4K resolution screens.
Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) is dedicated to making spectroscopic measurements of galaxies, which involves determining how much light they emit per wavelength. This is useful for measuring the galaxies’ redshift, which cosmologists can use to estimate the distance to each galaxy. NISP has the largest field of view for an infrared instrument ever flown in space. The instrument measures near-infrared light (900–2000 nm) using a grid of 16 detectors, each containing more than 2000 by 2000 pixels.
Euclid is ESA’s space telescope designed to explore the dark Universe. The mission will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe ever produced across 10 billion years of cosmic time. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how large-scale structure is distributed across space and time, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s Euclid spacecraft is approximately 4.7 m tall and 3.7 m in diameter. It consists of two major components: the service module and the payload module.
The payload module comprises a 1.2 m diameter telescope and two scientific instruments: a visible-wavelength camera (the VISible instrument, VIS) and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer (the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP).
The service module contains the satellite systems: electric power generation and distribution, attitude control, data processing electronics, propulsion, telecommanding and telemetry, and thermal control.
Euclid is designed to provide both excellent quality imaging in the visible, and spectroscopy and photometry in the near infrared. The sunshield keeps the telescopes and instruments shaded from the Sun to ensure thermal stability and highly sensitive measurements. It will make sure VIS operates at -33 °C and NISP at -180 °C.
To store the large data volume that will be accumulated during observations, Euclid has a mass memory of 4 terabits.
Euclid is ESA’s space telescope designed to explore the dark Universe. The mission will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe ever produced across 10 billion years of cosmic time. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how large-scale structure is distributed across space and time, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. By accurately mapping the shape, positions and distance of a huge number of galaxies, the space telescope will create a 3D map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time out to 10 billion light-years, and across more than a third of the sky.
Euclid will be launched by a Space X Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA and travel 1.5 million km from Earth, in the opposite direction to the Sun, to reach its orbit around the Lagrange point L2.
The payload module comprises a 1.2 m diameter telescope and two scientific instruments: a visible-wavelength camera (the VISible instrument, VIS) and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer (the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP).
The Euclid Consortium has delivered the VIS and NISP instruments to ESA. NASA provided the near-infrared detectors of NISP.
Euclid will address two core themes of ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015–2025:
- What are the fundamental physical laws of the Universe?
- How did the Universe originate and what is it made of?
Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the payload module, including the telescope. NASA provided the detectors of the the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This first-light image from the miniature HyperScout instrument aboard ESA’s newly launched GomX-4B CubeSat, shows the southern coast of Cuba.
GomX-4B, launched with partner nanosatellite GomX-4A on 2 February, is a multi-technology demonstration mission that is testing intersatellite radio links and micro-propulsion technologies , as well as this hyperspectral imager, developed by cosine Research in the Netherlands.
Colour equals information, so the more spectral bands an Earth-observing instrument sees, the greater quantity of environmental findings can be returned to its homeworld.
“Far more compact than previous hyperspectral imagers, HyperScout can observe in 45 visible and near-infrared spectral bands,” explains ESA optics engineer Alessandro Zuccaro Marchi.
“This is a single image with a footprint of approximately 200 x 150 sq. km where each horizontal line shows the scene in a different spectral band, proving the overall functioning chain of the HyperScout works as planned – from acquisition to compression and downlink to the ground.”
Marco Esposito of cosine Research adds: “This is very much a raw image, including atmospheric and solar effects that would normally be corrected as part of the full calibration and processing chain. It has also has undergone compression and pixel ‘binning’ to fit the limited satellite power and memory resources available during commissioning. But the amount of light captured here exceeds our expectations, suggesting a very promising signal-to-noise ratio is achievable for hyperspectral applications.
“We’re very pleased with this ‘first light’ view, and follow-up images will explore HyperScout’s hyperspectral capabilities.”
HyperScout is a ‘linear variable filter’ instrument, meaning each horizontal line of pixels it observes is seen at a different wavelength from 400 to 1000 nanometres, with the onward movement of the satellite allowing the rapid build-up of a complete hyperspectral image.
The instrument will target specific regions across the globe, intended to highlight rapid changes such as flooding, fire hazards, or variations in vegetation, or land cover and use occurring between acquisitions.
Credits: ESA/cosine Research
PANGAEA trainee Sergei Kud-Sverchkov is ready to rock, providing the science team with a detailed audio description of the highly-altered sample he is examining.
The main focus of the third session of Pangaea is volcanism. Lessons on the first day emphasized types of lavas and volcanoes found across Earth, Mars and the Moon.
ESA’s Pangaea training course prepares astronauts and space engineers to identify planetary geological features for future missions to the Moon, Mars and asteroids.
Leading European planetary geologists share their insights into the geology of the Solar System.
Through Pangaea, Europe is developing operational concepts for surface missions where astronauts and robots work together, among themselves and with scientists and engineers on Earth, using the best field geology and planetary observation techniques.
Stay tuned on the blog
Credits: ESA–A. Romeo
With satellites delivering a mindboggling amount of data about our planet along with the availability of the latest digital technologies, there are countless opportunities for innovation. ESA’s ɸ-week, explores how this new world can be embraced to bring even more benefits to all.
These drawings were done live during the conference main sessions and capture the essence of what the future of Earth Observation might look like.
Credits: ESA / courtesy of Picturise
To understand more about the dark Universe, ESA’s Euclid will measure a phenomenon known as ‘weak lensing’, based on the principle of gravitational lensing.
A concentration of matter along the line of sight can act like a magnifying glass, bending and distorting light from galaxies and clusters behind it. This effect is called gravitational lensing. Scientists distinguish between strong gravitational lensing, when the distortions are very apparent, like in the case of Einstein rings, arcs and multiple images, and weak gravitational lensing, when the distortions of background sources are much smaller. In this case, distortions (of a few percent) can only be detected by analysing large numbers of sources in a statistical way.
ESA’s Euclid will measure the distorted shapes of billions of galaxies over 10 billion years of cosmic history, thus providing a 3D view of the dark matter distribution in our Universe.
The map of the distribution of galaxies over cosmic time will also teach us about dark energy, which affects the spatial evolution of the large-scale structure.
Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the payload module, including the telescope. NASA provided the detectors of the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP. Euclid is a medium-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s Euclid mission aims to uncover the mysteries of the ‘dark’ Universe. This ominous-sounding invisible part of the cosmos makes up more than 95% of the mass and energy in our Universe.
For centuries, astronomers have aimed to learn more about the luminous sources of the cosmos: planets, stars, galaxies and gas, for example. But these objects make up only a small fraction of what the Universe contains.
95% of the Universe appears to be made up of unknown ‘dark’ matter and energy. Scientists estimate that dark matter makes up about 25% of the Universe and dark energy 70%. Dark matter and energy affect the motion and distribution of visible sources, but do not emit, absorb, or reflect any light, and scientists do not know yet what these entities actually are. Understanding their nature is therefore one of the most compelling challenges of cosmology and fundamental physics today.
Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the payload module, including the telescope. NASA provided the detectors of the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP. Euclid is a medium-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme.
Credits: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
View of Vega-C rocket, flight VV25, on the launch pad at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, 4 December 2024.
Sentinel-1C is the third Sentinel-1 satellite to be launched as part of Europe’s Copernicus programme. It will continue the critical task of delivering radar imagery for a wide range of services, applications and science – all of which benefit society.
Vega-C is a single-body rocket nearly 35 m high with that weighs 210 tonnes on the launch pad. Vega-C can launch about 2300 kg in a reference 700 km-polar orbit. Using a new range of payload carriers, Vega-C can accommodate a mix of cargo shapes and sizes, ranging from CubeSats to a large single payload.
Credits: ESA–S. Corvaja
This is the launcher that will transport BepiColombo to orbit. The upper part with the spacecraft and the fairing will be integrated in the ‘final assembly building’.
The image captures the transfer of the Ariane 5 launcher from the ‘launcher integration building’ to the ‘final assembly building’ at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou last week.
BepiColombo is a joint endeavour between ESA and JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It is the first European mission to Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner Solar System, and the first to send two spacecraft to make complementary measurements of the planet’s dynamic environment at the same time.
Launch is currently scheduled for 01:45 GMT on 20 October. Check for updates and follow the launch live
Credits: ESA-H. Ritter
Solar Orbiter must operate for years in one of the most hostile regions of the Solar System. At closest approach, approximately 42 million kilometres from the Sun, it will be at just over a quarter of the distance between the star and our planet, well inside the orbit of inner planet Mercury. This close to the Sun, the spacecraft will be exposed to sunlight 13 times more intense than what we feel on Earth. The spacecraft must also endure powerful bursts of particle radiation from explosions in the solar atmosphere. The spacecraft’s heatshield is key to making this mission possible, which can withstand temperatures of 500 ̊C. Small sliding doors with heat resistant windows let sunlight in to the science instruments located directly behind the protective heatshield.
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
On 7 July, at the Kryoneri Observatory, located near Athens, a powerful laser beacon has directed toward NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. Though it carries no data, the beacon is designed to be so precisely targeted that the DSOC experiment onboard Psyche can lock onto it and send a return signal back to Earth. That return signal is then captured by the Helmos Observatory, situated 37 km away on a neighbouring mountain peak.
The Ground Laser Receiver takes the form of a sophisticated receiver unit known as an ‘optical bench’. This single-photon sensitive receiver unit will be securely mounted to the rear of the 2.3 m Aristarchos telescope, located at 2340 m on the site of Helmos Observatory.
Credits: ESA
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over one of the most remote islands in the world: Easter Island. Located in the Pacific Ocean, over 3500 km off the west coast of South America, this Chilean island is also known as Rapa Nui by its original inhabitants. The island was given its current name the day Europeans arrived in the 1700s – on Easter Sunday.
The island is famous for its monolithic stone statues, called Moai, said to honour the memory of the inhabitants’ ancestors. There are nearly 1000 scattered around the island, usually positioned near freshwater. Many are located near the Rano Raraku volcano, on the southeast coast. The white edges along the southern coast show the harsh waves colliding with the shore.
An interesting feature of the image is the ochre-orange colour of the Poike – the peninsula on the eastern end of the island. In ancient times, it is said that there was a lot of vegetation on the island. However, land clearing for cultivation and the Polynesian rat played a role in deforestation, leading to the erosion of the soil, particularly in the east.
Several reforestation projects have been attempted, including a eucalyptus plantation in the middle of the island, visible in dark green. The brown patch to the right of the plantation is likely to be a burn scar from a wildfire.
The majority of the island’s inhabitants live in Hanga Roa, the main town and harbour on the west coast, clearly visible in the image. Interestingly, the long runway of the island’s only airport was once designated as an emergency landing site for the US space shuttle.
At the very edge of the southwest tip of the island lies Ranu Kao, the largest volcano on the island. Its shape is distinctive owing to its crater lake, one of the island’s only three natural bodies of water.
Many tourists are drawn to the island for its mysterious history and isolated position. What is relatively unknown is the existence of two small beaches on the northeast coast. Anakena beach has white, coral sand, while the smaller Ovahe beach, surrounded by cliffs, has pink sand.
Copernicus Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission. Each satellite carries a high-resolution camera that images Earth’s surface in 13 spectral bands. Data from Copernicus Sentinel-2 can help monitor changes in land cover.
This image, which was captured on 7 April 2019, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA,CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst is training together with NASA Astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor at the the Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA. The training took place on 6 March 2018 in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. The astronauts dealt with various emergency scenarios, including a fire in a laptop in the crew quarters, a fire in a lab module and a several communication issues. The goal is to prepare the crew for possible emergencies.
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 astronaut is now in the last stages of training for his challenging mission. 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