Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 13-17 March 2023

Image: Hubble’s neighbourhood watch

Image: Botswana’s Okavango Delta – the world’s largest inland delta – is featured in this multitemporal radar image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission.

How students built Ireland's first satellite

A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail.

Video: 00:13:54

A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe.

Europe’s Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, providing metre-level accuracy and very precise timing to its four billion users. An essential ingredient to ensure this stays the case are the atomic clocks aboard each satellite, delivering pinpoint timekeeping that is maintained to a few billionths of a second. These clocks are called atomic because their ‘ticks’ come from ultra-rapid, ultra-stable oscillation of atoms between different energy states. Sustaining this performance demands, in turn, even more accurate clocks down on the ground to keep the satellites synchronised and ensure stability of time and positioning for users.  

An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted to the Agency’s #SpaceJuice competition  in January.

Image: The icy landscape of Graham Coast, which lies on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

Would you like to know the future of satellite navigation? Try ESA’s Navigation Laboratory. This is a site where navigation engineers test prototypes of tomorrow's user receivers, using simulated versions of the navigation signals planned for the coming decade, such as set to be transmitted from Galileo’s Second Generation satellites. 

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.