Space News & Blog Articles

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.

Week in images: 20-24 February 2023

Image: The Triple Frontier, a region where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, is featured in this false-colour image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Image: Cosmic contortions

ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence is about to gain its sight. Two complete and fully tested Asteroid Framing Cameras have reached OHB in Germany for integration aboard Hera’s payload module. This instrument will provide the very first star-like view of Hera’s target for the mission to steer towards the Dimorphos asteroid, which last year had its orbit altered by an impact with NASA’s DART mission.

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In the 1980s, scientists discovered a gaping hole in Earth's ozone layer, caused by humanmade chemicals. But thanks to the historical Montreal Protocol, the world came together to take bold action to save our planet. Decades later, we can see the steady recovery of the ozone hole. How did we do it? And what does space have to do with it? Join us as we explore the journey of the ozone hole, from its alarming discovery to the incredible strides made to fix it, and how satellites are helping us track its recovery.

Image: Farming on the Moon

This year started with a nice imaging opportunity for Solar Orbiter, and a chance to further improve the quality of its data. On 3 January 2023, inner planet Mercury crossed the spacecraft’s field of view, resulting in a transit where Mercury appeared as a perfectly black circle moving across the face of the Sun.

Understanding Earth’s delicate natural balance and how it is being altered by human activity is not only key to advancing science but also fundamental to acting on environmental issues, the climate crisis, and preparing for their societal impact. With their hallmark of demonstrating novel space technologies and returning scientific excellence, ESA’s family of Earth observing Earth Explorer research satellite missions are world-renowned – and now it’s time for scientists to pitch their new ideas for the twelfth mission in this outstanding series.

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ESA’s Euclid mission is undergoing the final test before launch in July 2023.

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.