Space News & Blog Articles

For one hour on Friday 2 June, join ESA on YouTube for a space first as live images stream down direct from Mars – this will be the closest you can get to a live view from the Red Planet.

Registration is now open for ESA’s first-ever Earth Observation Commercialisation Forum. Taking place at ESA Headquarters in Paris from 30 to 31 October 2023, investors, institutions, entrepreneurs and companies of any size from the Earth observation sector will now be able to come together and discuss the commercial potential and challenges of Earth observation, together with the technical, industrial and risk-capital support available to European companies.

Interaction between moon’s plumes and Saturn’s ring system explored with Webb

A water vapour plume from Saturn’s moon Enceladus spanning more than 9600 kilometres — long enough to stretch across the Eurasian continent from Ireland to Japan — has been detected by researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Not only is this the first time such water ejection has been seen over such an expansive distance, but Webb is also giving scientists a direct look, for the first time, at how this emission feeds the water supply for the entire system of Saturn and its rings.

Flight controllers at ESA’s mission control centre in Germany have been busy this week, working with instrument teams on the final deployments to prepare ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) for exploring Jupiter.

Week in images: 22-26 May 2023

Image: This radar image from Copernicus Sentinel-1 shows the city of São Paulo and part of the homonymous state in southeast Brazil.

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Detect, fetch and collect. A seemingly easy task is being tested to find the best strategy to collect samples on the martian surface, some 290 000 km away from home.

Earth’s declining ice is without a doubt one of the clearest signs of climate change. A new high-resolution sea-ice concentration data record has just been released as part of ESA’s Climate Change Initiative – providing new insights of sea ice concentration across the globe.

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Enjoy a sneak peek of ESA’s new documentary that looks at fire in all its fury - and how satellite technology is helping to mitigate this consequence of climate change. Join us on this journey as we meet the firefighter who fought one of the largest wildfires in his career, climate scientists working with satellite data, and the people on the frontline using these data to aid those affected. The full documentary will be released this summer.

Image: Mars corner

The Arctic, once again at the forefront of climate change, is experiencing disproportionately higher temperature increases compared to the rest of the planet, triggering a series of cascading effects known as Arctic amplification. As concerns continue to grow, satellites developed by ESA have become indispensable tools in understanding and addressing the complex dynamics at play and the far-reaching consequences for the environment and human societies.

ESA has been presented the ‘Space for Climate Protection’ Special Award by the International Astronautical Federation during the Global Space Conference on Climate Change – currently taking place in Oslo, Norway.

Lying in bed for a full 60 days – with one shoulder always touching the mattress – might sound like bliss, but add cycling, spinning and constant medical tests to the equation and it becomes a challenging experience for the sake of human space exploration.

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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.

Euclid: exploring the dark Universe

The first instrument to directly measure gravity on the surface of an asteroid has undergone testing in ESA’s Mechanical Systems Laboratory.

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The name of Andreas’s second mission to the Space Station is ‘Huginn’. Inspired by Norse mythology, the name is taken from one of two ravens who serve the god Odin. Called Huginn and Muninn, these two birds sit on Odin’s shoulders and are sent flying across the world at dawn. They return at night to inform him of the many events they have seen and heard. In Old Norse, ‘Huginn’ means ‘thought’ and ‘Muninn’ means ‘mind’ or ‘memory’.

ESA Astronaut Andreas Mogensen will fly to the International Space Station for his second mission called Huginn, in late summer of 2023. It will be a mission of firsts for both Andreas and ESA. 

An advanced broadband satellite that will demonstrate next-generation 5G connectivity by providing high-speed internet services has launched into space.