The Smile mission is set to launch on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on Thursday 9 April at 08:29 CEST/07:29 BST/03:29 local time. Follow along as we communicate on the final preparations for launch. Journalists are invited to join online media briefings in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German.
Image: This image from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission shows us the maritime traffic passing through the Øresund Strait in 2025.
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Watch the replay of the media information session where ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and ESA Council Chair Renato Krpoun outline the key decisions and main outcomes of the Council meeting held in Interlaken, Switzerland, on 18 and 19 March 2026.
With more than 400 positions to be published in 2026, the European Space Agency has launched a recruitment drive to support ESA’s programmes, missions and strategic initiatives following the 2025 Ministerial Council in Bremen. To help make these projects a reality, we will be recruiting many new colleagues in engineering and science, as well as support services! Your next big opportunity could be here, so read on to find out more. You can also set up a job alert to be the first one to know when opportunities are published.
A successful deep-space manoeuvre has put ESA’s Hera spacecraft on course for its rendezvous with the Didymos binary asteroid system later this year.
Comet K1, whose full name is Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), had just passed its closest approach to the Sun and was heading out of the Solar System. Though it had been intact just days before, K1 fragmented into at least four pieces while the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was watching. The odds of that happening while Hubble viewed the comet are extraordinarily miniscule.
Thanks to the success of the Arctic Weather Satellite prototype and Eumetsat’s recent greenlight to develop a full constellation of similar satellites called Sterna, the European Space Agency has awarded OHB Sweden with the contract to build 20 satellites.
It seems improbable that a satellite designed to monitor polar ice sheets and floating sea ice could accurately measure a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field. But that is just what ESA’s CryoSat mission did earlier this year.
This year for International Women’s Day, we showcase some of the women from the European Space Agency’s most recent female leadership recruits: Céline Begon, Christine Boelsche, Céline Folsché and Ildiko Raczne Szoke.
At ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), teams work around the clock to fly spacecraft across the Solar System and monitor Earth from orbit. Among them are women leading spacecraft operations, managing teams and helping shape the culture of ESA’s mission control.
At approximately 18:55 CET (17:55 UTC) on Sunday 8 March 2026, a very bright fireball moving from the southwest to the northeast was observed by many people in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
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[EN] “Believe in your dreams, believe in yourself, and believe in that little nothing, that εpsilon, that can change everything…”
The Smile spacecraft has arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. During the coming weeks, the spacecraft will go through final preparations for its launch on a Vega-C rocket between 8 April and 7 May.
Image: These two views from Copernicus Sentinel-2 reveal the landscape transformation in the area around Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
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ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot began her training at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, where she studied spacecraft systems and crew operations — learning to think and act as an astronaut. Alongside this, she conditioned her body for spaceflight and prepared for the physical and operational demands of her mission.
Craters, craters, and yet more craters: this snapshot from ESA’s Mars Express is packed full of them, each as fascinating as the last.
The ice along Antarctica’s ‘grounding lines’ has been largely stable over the past 30 years – but ice has retreated by more than 40 km in some areas, a new study based on satellite data finds.
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