Space News & Blog Articles

Image: Mars corner

The Arctic, once again at the forefront of climate change, is experiencing disproportionately higher temperature increases compared to the rest of the planet, triggering a series of cascading effects known as Arctic amplification. As concerns continue to grow, satellites developed by ESA have become indispensable tools in understanding and addressing the complex dynamics at play and the far-reaching consequences for the environment and human societies.

ESA has been presented the ‘Space for Climate Protection’ Special Award by the International Astronautical Federation during the Global Space Conference on Climate Change – currently taking place in Oslo, Norway.

Lying in bed for a full 60 days – with one shoulder always touching the mattress – might sound like bliss, but add cycling, spinning and constant medical tests to the equation and it becomes a challenging experience for the sake of human space exploration.

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Satellites play a vital role in monitoring the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic. Tracking ice lost from the world’s glaciers, ice sheets and frozen land shows that Earth is losing ice at an accelerating rate.

Euclid: exploring the dark Universe

The first instrument to directly measure gravity on the surface of an asteroid has undergone testing in ESA’s Mechanical Systems Laboratory.

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The name of Andreas’s second mission to the Space Station is ‘Huginn’. Inspired by Norse mythology, the name is taken from one of two ravens who serve the god Odin. Called Huginn and Muninn, these two birds sit on Odin’s shoulders and are sent flying across the world at dawn. They return at night to inform him of the many events they have seen and heard. In Old Norse, ‘Huginn’ means ‘thought’ and ‘Muninn’ means ‘mind’ or ‘memory’.

ESA Astronaut Andreas Mogensen will fly to the International Space Station for his second mission called Huginn, in late summer of 2023. It will be a mission of firsts for both Andreas and ESA. 

An advanced broadband satellite that will demonstrate next-generation 5G connectivity by providing high-speed internet services has launched into space.

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Oslo, Norway’s capital and largest city, and host of the 2023 Global Space Conference on Climate Change, taking place on 23–25 May.

Adding to the grim list of record ice losses, record air temperatures and record droughts, which have all hit the headlines recently, the temperature of the surface waters of our oceans is also at an all-time high. With an El Niño looming, concerns are that we will soon be facing even worse extremes. Satellites orbiting overhead are being used to carefully track the patterns that lead up to El Niño to further understand and predict the consequences of this cyclic phenomenon against the backdrop of climate change.

Image: Origami heat shield: reusable for reentries

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has enabled another long-sought scientific breakthrough, this time for Solar System scientists studying the origins of the water that has made life on Earth possible. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, astronomers have confirmed gas – specifically water vapour – around a comet in the main asteroid belt for the first time, proving that water from the primordial Solar System can be preserved as ice in that region. However, the successful detection of water comes with a new puzzle: unlike other comets, Comet 238P/Read had no detectable carbon dioxide.

More than three weeks after efforts began to deploy Juice’s ice-penetrating Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna, the 16-metre-long boom has finally escaped its mounting bracket.

Last month, ESA’s woolly astronaut became Europe's first lunar ‘lamb-bassador’: Shaun the Sheep returned home from his Artemis I mission to a hero's welcome and then was herded off on a celebratory post-flight tour.

Week in images: 08-12 May 2023

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image features the Japanese island of Nishinoshima, in the northwest Pacific Ocean.

Help us visualise how much of the Universe we know and don’t know and win a trip to mission control as ESA’s Euclid mission launches into space no earlier than July to unlock the mysteries of the Dark Universe.