There is an increasing willingness in the space sector to tackle the problem of space debris. Yet much of the required technology to mitigate or prevent its risks is still missing.
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Space News & Blog Articles
Tune into the SpaceZE News Network to stay updated on industry news from around the world.
Three InCubed satellites have launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, highlighting ESA’s role as partner to industry and its support for business and technology innovation.
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Video: 00:01:36
Fly over Mercury with BepiColombo for the final time during the mission’s epic expedition around the Sun. The ESA/JAXA spacecraft captured these images of the Solar System's smallest planet on 7 and 8 January 2025, before and during its sixth encounter with Mercury. This was its final planetary flyby until it enters orbit around the planet in late 2026.
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The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton has detected rapidly fluctuating X-rays coming from the very edge of a supermassive black hole in the heart of a nearby galaxy. The results paint a fascinating picture that defies how we thought matter falls into such black holes, and points to a potential source of gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission, LISA, could see.
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On 8 January 2025, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission flew past Mercury for the sixth time, successfully completing the final ‘gravity assist manoeuvre’ needed to steer it into orbit around the planet in late 2026. The spacecraft flew just a few hundred kilometres above the planet's north pole. Close-up images expose possibly icy craters whose floors are in permanent shadow, and the vast sunlit northern plains.
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Video: 00:01:14
At the start of this new year, we look back at close-up pictures and solar flare data recorded by the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission over the last three years. See and hear for yourself how the number of flares and their intensity increase, a clear sign of the Sun approaching the peak of the 11-year solar cycle.
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Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image from 13 November 2024 shows the Lewotobi Laki Laki volcano eruption on the island of Flores in southern Indonesia.
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In emergency evacuations, access to reliable information can mean the difference between life and death. As our world faces growing challenges from natural disasters and conflicts, the need for rapid, accurate data during evacuations is vital.
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Video: 00:07:25
Meet Copernicus Sentinel-1 – this ground-breaking mission delivers continuous, all-weather, day-and-night imaging for land, ice and maritime monitoring.
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Video: 00:04:30
Explore the immense power of water as ESA’s Mars Express takes us on a flight over curving channels, streamlined islands and muddled ‘chaotic terrain’ on Mars, soaking up rover landing sites along the way.
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Zoom into Solar Orbiter's four new Sun images, assembled from high-resolution observations by the spacecraft's PHI and EUI instruments made on 22 March 2023. The PHI images are the highest-resolution full views of the Sun's visible surface to date, including maps of the Sun's messy magnetic field and movement on the surface. These can be compared to the new EUI image, which reveals the Sun's glowing outer atmosphere, or corona.
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Video: 00:02:18
At ESA, through the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems programme, we’re addressing solutions for when safety and security of communication services cannot be guaranteed by the terrestrial networks alone. With our programme Space systems for Safety and Security, or 4S, we are pioneering cutting-edge development of secure and resilient satellite communication systems, technologies and services to improve life on Earth.
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As Arctic temperatures rise, marine-terminating glaciers—especially in places like Svalbard—are undergoing rapid retreat and intensified calving.
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Video: 00:04:31
The double-satellite Proba-3 is the most ambitious member yet of ESA’s Proba family of experimental missions. Two spacecraft will fly together as one, maintaining precise formation down to a single millimetre. One will block out the fiery disc of the Sun for the other, to enable prolonged observations of the Sun’s surrounding atmosphere, or ‘corona’, the source of the solar wind and space weather. Usually, the corona can only be glimpsed for a few minutes during terrestrial total solar eclipses. Proba-3 aims to reproduce such eclipses for up to six hours at a time, in a highly elliptical orbit taking it more than 60 000 km from Earth. The two spacecraft are being launched together by India’s PSLV-XL launcher from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Follow the mission’s deployment and commissioning, up to its first glimpse of the corona, in this overview video.
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Marking a major milestone in the preparation of Copernicus Sentinel-1C for its scheduled 3 December liftoff, experts have completed the critical and hazardous process of fuelling the satellite.
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