Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 13-17 November 2023

Image: The North Channel, between Northern Ireland and Scotland, is featured in this false-colour radar image from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission.

The new Galileo satellite model from Thales Alenia Space underwent mechanical and signal performance testing this summer at ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre. Structural models resisted launch-like noise and vibrations while an electrical model proved its ability to send Galileo signals - a major milestone in the development of Galileo’s Second Generation.

Video: 00:22:10

A team of university students from University College Dublin is taking Ireland to space, for the very first time. The story begins in 2017, when the team was accepted to ESA's educational CubeSat programme, Fly Your Satellite! Over the course of six years, they have designed, built, and tested the satellite with the help of ESA experts and with access to ESA's state-of-the-art spacecraft testing facilities. As the team prepares for launch and operations, hear more about their journey to this historic moment.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has measured the size of the nearest Earth-sized exoplanet that passes across the face of a neighbouring star. This alignment, called a transit, opens the door to follow-on studies to see what kind of atmosphere, if any, the rocky world might have.

Forty years ago this month, the first European-built Spacelab was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on board Space Shuttle Columbia. Also on board was Ulf Merbold, who became ESA's first astronaut in space. The 10-day Spacelab-1 mission marked ESA's entry into human spaceflight activities.

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Watch the replay of the press conference with ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt taking place at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne (Germany) as he prepares for his first mission to the International Space Station.

Image: One of the world’s most active volcanoes, Mount Etna, erupted on Sunday – spewing lava and clouds of ash high over the Mediterranean island of Sicily. This image, captured on 13 November by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, has been processed using the mission’s shortwave-infrared bands to show the lava flow at the time of acquisition.

Video: 00:02:09

Overview of ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt’s training for his mission to space.

Having satellites in different types of orbit is essential to delivering data to forecast the weather accurately. With the first Meteosat Third Generation Imager satellite safely in geostationary orbit since December 2022, it’s also time to focus on its polar-orbiting cousin, the MetOp Second Generation mission. And now, for the first time, two MetOp Second Generation satellites have been brought together to stand side-by-side for testing.

Image: Fall into an ice giant’s atmosphere

Video: 00:03:23

Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide. Curbing methane emissions could deliver immediate and long-lasting benefits for the climate, seeing as the gas only lingers in the atmosphere for a relatively short time.

Europe – and the world – is in the midst of the ‘quantum decade’: a period in which the peculiar properties of matter that manifest at the very tiniest of scales are being transformed from mere scientific curiosities into the basis of practical technologies and products. The result? Major leaps forward in communications, navigation, computing and environmental sensing.

An enormous burst of gamma rays, detected by ESA’s Integral space telescope, has struck Earth. The blast caused a significant disturbance in our planet’s ionosphere. Such disturbances are usually associated with energetic particle events on the Sun but this one was the result of an exploding star almost two billion light-years away. Analysing the effects of the blast could provide information about the mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Week in images: 06-10 November 2023

ESA’s Hera asteroid mission has completed acoustic testing, confirming the spacecraft can withstand the sound of its own lift-off into orbit. Testing took place within the Agency’s Large European Acoustic Facility at the ESTEC Test Centre in the Netherlands. This is Europe’s largest and most powerful sound system, fitted with a quartet of noise horns that can generate more than 154 decibels of extreme noise.

Image: This image, from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on 1 November 2023, captures the colours of autumn over the Japanese archipelago.

When future astronauts explore Mars’s polar regions, they will see a green glow lighting up the night sky. For the first time, a visible nightglow has been detected in the martian atmosphere by ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) mission.

Video: 00:04:25

On Saturday 21st October, the European Space Agency opened the doors of the European Space Astronomy Centre in Villanueva de la Cañada (near Madrid), ESAC, to host the ESA Open Day. With a full program of talks and activities, the event featured tours, hands-on laboratories for children and get-togethers with science communicators, ESA astronaut and experts. More than 1800 people, among adults and children, had the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the activities and programs in which ESA is involved every day.