Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 26-30 September 2022

ESA welcomed a record 1700 visitors from 800 companies and institutions to its Industry Space Days event on 28–29 September at ESTEC, its technical centre in The Netherlands. It is a place where industry can meet and share their ideas for new emerging uses of space and commercial potential.

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What do you call three or more space fanatics? Interns.

The first of Europe’s Meteosat Third Generation satellites is now safely aboard a ship and making its way across the Atlantic to French Guiana where it will be readied for liftoff in December. Once launched into geostationary orbit, 36 000 km above Earth, this new satellite, which carries two new extremely sensitive instruments, will take weather forecasting to the next level.

During spring and summer, as the air warms up and the sun beats down on the Greenland Ice Sheet, melt ponds pop up. Melt ponds are vast pools of open water that form on both sea ice and ice sheets and are visible as turquoise-blue pools of water in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

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The final pre-launch preparations for the first Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite are underway. The first satellite, called MTG-I1, built by a European industrial consortium led by Thales Alenia Space carries two imagers: an advanced Flexible Combined Imager  and, in a first for Europe, a Lightning Imager that will allow the earlier detection of storms and extreme weather events, as well as improve aviation safety.  

Swiss watch brand Omega has teamed up with ESA to launch the Marstimer: the first watch to display the time on Earth and Mars. Developed in partnership with ESA’s Mars exploration teams and tested at ESA ESTEC, this new watch is space-tough and Mars-mission ready.

Two of the great space observatories, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a unique experiment to smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid. Observations of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact mark the first time that Webb and Hubble were used to simultaneously observe the same celestial target.

ESA Impact Q3 is now online!

ESA Space Shop is bringing space closer to the people of Rome! The first physical ESA Space Shop concept store mixes space fashion with cosmic in-store experiences and official ESA merchandise.

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Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA's DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more. 

ESA continues to break down barriers and create more opportunities for small companies to get involved in space. Start-up companies and small enterprises offer agile and bespoke development adding value to Europe’s future space economy.

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The night of 26 September 2022 will make space history - as the moment when NASA's DART spacecraft impacts the Dimorphos asteroid in an attempt to divert its course - humankind's first planetary defence test. Next, in 2024, ESA launches its Hera spacecraft to investigate the post-impact asteroid. In fact, Hera is not one spacecraft but three: it carries with it ESA's first deep-space CubeSats to make extra observations of its target.

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These spectacular images feature the spiral galaxy IC 5332, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (left) and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (right). The images display the powerful capabilities that both world-leading space telescopes provide, especially when combining their data.

ESA’s Hera mission team congratulates their counterparts in NASA’s DART mission team for their historic impact with the Dimorphos asteroid. Moving at 6.1 km per second, the vending-machine-sized Double Asteroid Redirect Test spacecraft struck the 160-m diameter asteroid at 01:15 CEST (00:15 BST) in the early hours of Tuesday morning, in humankind’s first test of the ‘kinetic impactor’ method of planetary defence.

The Sun never stops shining in space, and it is much more intense there than on the surface of the Earth. So what if we could gather that energy up in space then beam it down to Earth?

Week in images: 19-23 September 2022

Lake Trasimeno, the fourth largest lake in Italy, is featured in this week’s Earth from Space image.

Following  preparatory activities and a stringent process  ESA Member States today formally selected Harmony for implementation as the tenth Earth Explorer mission within the FutureEO programme . This unique satellite mission concept is, therefore, now set to become a reality to provide a wealth of new information about our oceans, ice, earthquakes and volcanoes – which will make significant contributions to climate research and risk monitoring.

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A vertical beam of sunlight appears to shoot up into the sky outside Concordia research station in Antarctica in this image taken by ESA-sponsored medical doctor Hannes Hagson.