Space News & Blog Articles

Thawing permafrost in the Arctic is already unleashing methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, exacerbating global temperature rise. As well adding to the climate crisis, this ground, which has been frozen for thousands of years, is becoming unstable and causing serious issues for local communities. For the first time, data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions along with artificial intelligence have been used to offer a complete overview of the Arctic to identify communities and infrastructure that will be at risk over the next 30 years.

ESA offers an opportunity for payloads and experiments to ride on board the first flight of Ariane 6 planned in 2022. Notice of interest should reach ESA by 15 November.

After almost 200 days in space it is time to return to planet Earth for ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide and NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur.

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After its arrival at Pariacabo harbour in French Guiana on 12 October 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was transported to Europe’s Spaceport and unboxed in the cleanroom. It is now being prepared for its launch on an Ariane 5 rocket in December. 

Week in images: 01 - 05 November 2021

From panoramas to close-ups, from 3D maps to a wheel selfie, the Earth-bound twin of ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover is testing the wide range of photo settings that will deliver the greatest science possible during the ExoMars mission on the Red Planet.

Melt – ESA’s newly released documentary

European dates for the ‘Space Station Earth’ immersive concert tour, have been announced this week.

The Shetland Islands, an archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland, are featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

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Space can be a cruel mistress, but she is a beautiful one.

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Glaciers across the globe have lost over nine trillion tonnes of ice in half a century. How will glaciers look over the coming decades? “It all depends on what humans are doing now in terms of greenhouse gas emissions:” this is the message one scientist delivered during an ESA-led expedition to the Gorner Glacier in Switzerland – one of the biggest ice masses in the Alps.

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ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet had a call with the French President Emmanuel Macron on 4 November 2021 from the International Space Station. The call came at the end of Thomas’s second mission to space called Alpha.

Arguably, humankind has never been more aware of the jeopardy we and the planet face because of climate change. As world leaders at COP26 work to accelerate action towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions to keep the goal of 1.5°C temperature rise within reach, we bring you a new easy-to-use guide on what ESA is doing to understand and monitor climate change from space – data that are essential for policy-makers.

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A collection of the best timelapse videos made during ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet’s second mission to the International Space Station, “Alpha” in 2021. The camera is setup to take pictures at intervals of two a second, and the pictures are then edited into this video that plays at 25 pictures a second. Most videos around 12 times faster than real speed.

In the first 20 years of reaching the atmosphere, methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Reducing emissions of this extremely potent gas is, therefore, one of the fastest ways of slowing the rate of global warming, at least in the short term – and at COP26, more than 100 countries have just signed up to the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to limit emissions by 30% compared with 2020 levels.

As world leaders and decision-makers join forces at COP26 to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, new research, again, highlights the value of satellite data in understanding and monitoring climate change. This particular new research, which is based on measurements from ESA’s CryoSat mission, shows that extreme ice melting events in Greenland have become more frequent and more intense over the past 40 years, raising sea levels and the risk of flooding worldwide.

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The climate crisis is the most urgent challenge faced by humankind – affecting every region, continent, and ocean on Earth. Space has an untapped potential to make a difference in tackling the threats and challenges faced by humanity. Satellites watch over Earth continuously, helping us to monitor, understand, model, predict and act on climate change and its related challenges.

Image: Hunting for marine plastic

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Satellites play a vital role in monitoring the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic. Tracking ice lost from the world’s glaciers, ice sheets and frozen land shows that Earth is losing ice at an accelerating rate. Currently more than a trillion tonnes of ice is lost each year. The sooner Earth’s temperature is stabilised, the more manageable the impacts of ice loss will be.

Géraldine Naja took up duty as Director of Commercialisation, Industry and Procurement (D/CIP), based at ESA Headquarters in Paris, on 1 November 2021.