Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 18-22 July 2022

A large data-driven telecommunications satellite that uses innovative technology to keep cool as well as other innovations – developed under an ESA Partnership Project – has started its commercial service.

ESA’s upcoming EarthCARE satellite mission has just taken a big stretch. Engineers have gently unfolded this new satellite’s huge five-panel solar wing to test that it will deploy correctly once it is in space. The solar wing is a critical part of the satellite, providing the energy for EarthCARE to do its job: to quantify the role that clouds and aerosols play in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere.

Image: Bound up with the Moon

The latest image release from ESA’s Mars Express takes us over two ruptures in the martian crust that form part of the mighty Valles Marineris canyon system.

On 21 July 2022, ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will head outside the International Space Station on a spacewalk alongside cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev. It will be Samantha’s first spacewalk, and the first conducted by a European woman.

With searing temperatures and a string of record highs being smashed across western Europe, the current heatwave is all too apparent. Extreme heat warnings have been issued in several countries including France, Spain and Portugal, and deadly wildfires have forced thousands to flee their homes. The satellite images here are an example of how the crisis is being viewed by satellites orbiting Earth.

Image: From Blu-Ray players to Earth orbit

The mission to return martian samples back to Earth will see a European 2.5 metre-long robotic arm pick up tubes filled with precious soil from Mars and transfer them to a rocket for an historic interplanetary delivery.

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Discover the top five mysteries that ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission will solve.

Image: These Copernicus Sentinel-2 images, one year apart, show the area affected by wildfire around Las Batuecas - Sierra de Francia Nature Reserve near Salamanca in western Spain.

Week in images: 11-15 July 2022

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ESA’s newest launch system has faced its first full validation test, carrying LARES-2, a scientific mission of the Italian space agency ASI, and a secondary payload package of French, Italian and Slovenian research CubeSats.

ESA’s new Vega-C rocket has completed its inaugural flight, placing main payload LARES-2 – a scientific mission of the Italian Space Agency ASI – into its planned orbit. Six research CubeSats from France, Italy and Slovenia flew as secondary payloads. The launch caps a multi-year effort by ESA, prime contractor Avio and industrial partners in 13 ESA member states to build on the heritage of its predecessor, Vega. 

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Flight VV21 clears the launch pad to begin the inaugural mission of ESA’s new Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

An ESA-financed nanosatellite, due to lift off aboard the inaugural flight of Vega-C today, will operate an AI system in the harsh, radiation-wracked environment of the Van Allen Belts. The shoebox-sized Trisat-R – one of six ‘CubeSats’ on the flight, headed up to a rarely-trafficked close to 6000 km altitude orbit – is also carrying radiation-detection payloads from CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, Slovenian firm SkyLabs and ESA itself.

The international NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the distant Universe so far.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has revealed details of the Southern Ring planetary nebula that were previously hidden from astronomers.

In this enormous new image, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen details of the galaxy group “Stephan’s Quintet”.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars in Carina Nebula that were previously obscured.