Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 20-24 November 2023

Watch the live launch broadcast of Ireland’s first satellite EIRSAT-1 on ESA Web TV Channel 2 and ESA YouTube, currently scheduled for 29 November. Coverage of this historic moment is set to begin shortly before 18:00 UTC (19:00 CET) (times to be confirmed). 

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captures the colourful waters of two salty lakes in East Africa: Lake Natron in northern Tanzania and Lake Magadi in southern Kenya.

Video: 00:08:32

On 23 November 2023, in preparation for its first flight, Ariane 6 went through its biggest test to date: a full-scale rehearsal that meant complex fuelling, a launch countdown and ignition of the core stage Vulcain 2.1 engine, followed by over seven minutes of engine burn that covered the entire core stage flight phase, just as would happen during a real launch into space.

Video: 02:02:28

One giant planet. Three icy moons. An eight-year journey. One special spacecraft.

Image: A satellite’s death spiral

ESA has reached a significant milestone in its commitment towards a deeper understanding of Earth's dynamic processes and addressing pressing environmental challenges with the selection of two new candidates – Cairt and Wivern – to progress to the next development phase as part of the process of realising the Agency’s eleventh Earth Explorer satellite mission.

Embracing the New Space approach, it has taken just 36 months to develop and build ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite. Now complete, this remarkable microsatellite has been shipped from OHB in Sweden to Germany where it is starting a series of tests to make sure that it will survive liftoff next year and its subsequent life in orbit.

The latest image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense centre of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

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.

Video: 00:39:52

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.