Space News & Blog Articles

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In the week of 13-17 March 2023, more than 1400 students attended the ESA School Days event at ESRIN, the ESA Centre for Earth Observation located in Frascati, near Rome, Italy. The students and their teachers, coming from Lazio and other Italian regions, discovered more about ESA and the projects it is involved in, thanks also to creative hands-on labs, a visit to the Earth observation multimedia centre and the launch of rocket models. During the full-day visit, the focus was on themes such as Earth observation, satellites in orbit, ESA launch programmes, asteroid tracking, and how space exploration and ESA’s activities benefit daily life. 

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After five years of intensive refurbishment works, the Headquarters of the European Space Agency has reopened its doors on rue Mario Nikis in Paris, France. As flexible as it is ultra-modern, ‘ESA HQ Mario Nikis’ is the very embodiment of a European organisation at the cutting edge of high technology and is resolutely open to the city it calls home.

Join us on 23 March to hear about ambitious new ideas for space exploration from ESA's 315th Council, taking place in the freshly renovated ESA HQ Mario Nikis building in Paris.

ESA's Gaia mission has been collecting data on millions of space objects like stars and asteroids to build an extensive cosmic record. Now, to take it up a notch, it needs your eyes.

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Explore the fascinating landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover in this fly-through video, featuring new views of Jezero crater and its surroundings from ESA’s Mars Express and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

ESA Impact – March 2023 Council edition

The final instalment of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released today. The report warns that the planet has already warmed 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, resulting in more frequent and intense extreme weather events that are causing increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world. 

Image: A close up of an Ariane 5 rocket surrounded by scaffolding. In the centre of the Ariane 5 is the sticker showing the artwork (blue background with Jupiter, three icy moons, Earth and Juice. All are smiling and Jupiter is holding Juice in its hands). Below the artwork is an ESA logo and the Juice mission patch (a round design with an outline of the spacecraft).

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More than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, but what do they look like? ESA’s dedicated exoplanet missions Cheops, Plato and Ariel are on a quest to find out. Cheops will focus its search on mini-Neptunes, planets with sizes between Earth and Neptune, on short orbits around their stars. Cheops will find out how large these planets are, and may detect whether the planets have clouds. Plato will look at all kinds of exoplanets and determine their sizes and ages. Plato’s instruments are so sensitive it may discover the first Earth-like planet on an Earth-like orbit. Finally, Ariel will look at the atmospheres of exoplanets using the technique of transmission spectroscopy and discover what they are made of. Together these missions will discover what exoplanets and their systems look like and they will also reveal how special our own Solar System is.

Week in images: 13-17 March 2023

Image: Hubble’s neighbourhood watch

Image: Botswana’s Okavango Delta – the world’s largest inland delta – is featured in this multitemporal radar image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission.

How students built Ireland's first satellite

A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail.

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A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe.

Europe’s Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, providing metre-level accuracy and very precise timing to its four billion users. An essential ingredient to ensure this stays the case are the atomic clocks aboard each satellite, delivering pinpoint timekeeping that is maintained to a few billionths of a second. These clocks are called atomic because their ‘ticks’ come from ultra-rapid, ultra-stable oscillation of atoms between different energy states. Sustaining this performance demands, in turn, even more accurate clocks down on the ground to keep the satellites synchronised and ensure stability of time and positioning for users.  

An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted to the Agency’s #SpaceJuice competition  in January.

Image: The icy landscape of Graham Coast, which lies on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

Would you like to know the future of satellite navigation? Try ESA’s Navigation Laboratory. This is a site where navigation engineers test prototypes of tomorrow's user receivers, using simulated versions of the navigation signals planned for the coming decade, such as set to be transmitted from Galileo’s Second Generation satellites.