Space News & Blog Articles

Passengers flying on Italy’s national carrier ITA Airways will experience fewer flight delays and greener travel thanks to pilots being able to use satellites to route their planes.

The interactive version of the Space Ambition book is now online, featuring all the content and images included in the hardcover edition.

Today Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, delivering metre-level accuracy, and if you are a modern smartphone owner then you – like nearly four billion others around the world – are among its users. This week we are celebrating that almost exactly a decade ago, on 12 March 2013, Europe for the first time ever was able to determine a position on the ground using only its own independent navigation system, Galileo. 

A partnership between ESA and PLAYMOBIL continues to inspire and educate children about space. It also helps to support the children’s humanitarian organisation UNICEF and its work with vulnerable children around the world.

Week in images: 27 February - 03 March 2023

Video: 00:45:00

The Independent Enquiry Commission tasked with analysing the loss of the Vega-C Flight VV22 mission shares its findings.

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image shows Poyang Lake in China’s Jiangxi Province during winter.

Press Release N° 7–2023

Image: Galactic seascape

Image: Part of an Ariane 5 launcher in a large warehouse

Image: Atom-scale scan of space materials

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of rapid changes to the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 545-kilogram spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The primary objective of the NASA mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. Though Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, data from the mission could help inform researchers how to potentially change an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary.

In 2023, ESA will be recruiting over 200 new colleagues to join our teams and support our mission of the peaceful exploration and use of space for the benefit of everyone. More than 30 vacancies have recently been published and many more will be coming soon, so if you are ready to take the next step in your career, this is your chance! Explore our vacancies and apply today. 

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This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the massive galaxy cluster RX J2129. Due to Gravitational lensing, this observation contains three different images of the same supernova-hosting galaxy, which you can see in closer detail here. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light travelling past or through it, almost like a vast lens. In this case, the lens is the galaxy cluster RX J2129, located around 3.2 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Gravitational lensing can cause background objects to appear strangely distorted, as can be seen by the concentric arcs of light in the upper right of this image.

Like many places, the Antarctic Peninsula is falling victim to rising temperatures. However, when scientists used radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission acquired between 2014 and 2021, they were taken aback to discover just how the fast 105 glaciers on the west coast are flowing in the summer months.

Image: Aurora over Wales

A new era of lunar exploration is on the rise, with dozens of Moon missions planned for the coming decade. Europe is in the forefront here, contributing to building the Gateway lunar station and the Orion spacecraft – set to return humans to our natural satellite – as well as developing its large logistic lunar lander, known as Argonaut. As dozens of missions will be operating on and around the Moon and needing to communicate together and fix their positions independently from Earth, this new era will require its own time.

ESA is inviting private space companies in Europe and Canada to create a shared commercial telecommunication and navigation service for lunar missions by putting a constellation of satellites around the Moon.