Space News & Blog Articles

ESA has awarded a contract worth €160 million to Airbus in the UK to build the Earth Explorer FORUM satellite. This exciting new mission will yield unique insight into the planet’s radiation budget and how it is controlled – thereby filling in a critical missing piece of the climate jigsaw.

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A beautiful sequence of 56 images taken by the monitoring cameras on board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission as the spacecraft made its second close flyby of its destination planet Mercury on 23 June 2022.

Image: The Po River, the longest river in Italy, is hitting record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. This Copernicus Sentinel-2 animation reveals how the river has significantly shrunk between June 2020 and June 2022.

Photo highlights from the ‘Space for Earth’ space pavilion at ILA, the Berlin Air and Space Show, from 22 to 26 .June 2022.

Week in images: 20-24 June 2022

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has made its second gravity assist of planet Mercury, capturing new close-up images as it steers closer towards Mercury orbit in 2025. 

Lake Balkhash, the largest lake in Central Asia, is featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Image: ESA – made of people

Vital research into health, climate, materials and more continues with ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and colleagues aboard the Space Station this month. Get up to date with what was on their schedule with May’s space science summary.

Image: Lunar science stirring on Mount Etna

Levels of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ariane 5 has delivered two telecommunications satellites, MEASAT-3d and GSAT-24, into their planned geostationary transfer orbits.

Film fans, gamers and future metaverse users will be able to experience high-quality videos, games and extended reality environments live and uninterrupted from anywhere, as satellites link up with terrestrial-based next-generation 5G and 6G connectivity.

Passengers on board commercial airline easyJet will speed to their destinations faster and greener, thanks to an ESA-backed initiative to digitalise the skies.

Crowds at the Berlin International Airshow – which will focus on innovation, new technology and sustainability – are set to be wowed by space.

Week in images: 13-17 June 2022

Part of the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, which lies along the coast of southeast Alaska, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

ESA’s new medium-lift Vega-C rocket is nearly ready for its inaugural flight, with its four fully-stacked stages now ready for payload integration, final checks and launch from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. 

ESA has put forward its ambitious plans for the next three years and beyond to increase European autonomy, leadership and responsibility in space.