Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 13-17 February 2023

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After many years of study, development, building and testing, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has finally arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. At the end of 2022 the spacecraft underwent its final thermal vacuum test at an Airbus Defence and Space facility in Toulouse, as well as its final software verification tests, whereby it was controlled from the ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

Image: The Liverpool Land peninsula, on the east coast of Greenland, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

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No one saw the Chelyabinsk meteor of 15 February 2013 coming – the largest asteroid to strike Earth in over a century. Just after sunrise on a sunny winter’s day, a 20-metre, 13 000 tonne asteroid struck the atmosphere over the Ural Mountains in Russia at a speed of more than 18 km/s.

ESA and the Mexican space agency, Agencia Espacial Mexicana (AEM) signed a Cooperation Agreement on 14 February 2023. The objective of this agreement is to allow Mexico and ESA to create a framework for more-intensive cooperation in joint projects in the future.

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For the seventh time, a small asteroid – a meteoroid as astronomers call it – was discovered in space as it raced towards Earth for impact. The predicted time and location of the impact (02:50 - 03:03 UTC, above northern France) were made possible with observations by European astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky using the 60 cm Schmidt telescope from the Piszkéstető Observatory in Hungary. 2023 CX1 is the second impactor discovered by Krisztián, after the impact of 2022 EB5 less than a year ago.  

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ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Türkiye and Syria are reeling from one of the worst earthquakes to strike the region in almost a century. Tens of thousands of people have been killed with many more injured in this tragedy.

Week in images: 06-10 February 2023

ESA celebrates the International Day of Women and Girls in Science  this 11 February, and highlights the story of the first all-female Systems Team in ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility, the place where ideas for new space missions, systems and structures take definite shape.

ESA’s mission to explore Jupiter and its largest moons has safely arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, where final preparations for its April launch are now underway.

Image: Agricultural fields that surround the cities of Lund and Malmö in Sweden are pictured in this image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Image: Can you spot it?

Image: Sound test of Hera asteroid mission antenna

Video: 00:03:21 Three-minute cinematic video trailer presenting ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission

During a break from looking at planets around other stars, ESA’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops) mission has observed a dwarf planet in our own Solar System and made a decisive contribution to the discovery of a dense ring of material around it.

Image: Deadly wildfires continue to rage in south-central Chile destroying hundreds of thousands of hectares of land across the country. Satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on 4 February show the ongoing fires and heatwave in South America.

A previously unknown 100–200-metre asteroid — roughly the size of Rome’s Colosseum — has been detected by an international team of European astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Their project used data from the calibration of the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), in which the team serendipitously detected an interloping asteroid. The object is likely the smallest observed to date by Webb and may be an example of an object measuring under 1 kilometer in length within the main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. More observations are needed to better characterize this object’s nature and properties.

Video: 00:05:36 Five-minute behind-the-scenes documentary covering the story behind the application of the Galileo tribute plaque to ESA’s Juice spacecraft.