Space News & Blog Articles

Hisdesat, Spain's premier provider of secure satellite communications, is set to launch its SpainSat Next Generation I (SNG I) satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 29 January from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 20:34 EST (30 January at 02:34 CET). The European Space Agency (ESA)-supported satellite will provide more cost-effective, adaptable and secure communication services for governments and emergency response teams across Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and up to Singapore in Asia.

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Listen to the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft as it flew past Mercury on 8 January 2025. This sixth and final flyby used the little planet's gravity to steer the spacecraft on course for entering orbit around Mercury in 2026. 

A study using data from ESA’s Swarm mission suggests that faint magnetic signatures created by Earth’s tides can help us determine magma distribution under the seabed and could even give us insights into long-term trends in global ocean temperatures and salinity.

A capacity increase by almost 80%! In late July 2024, the Malargüe deep-space communication station completed an important upgrade of its antenna feed that will allow missions to send much more data back to Earth.

Week in images: 13-17 January 2025

Image: Seed-sized space chip

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice.

The largest photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations, unveils hundreds of millions of stars. It took more than 10 years to collect data for this colorful portrait of our neighbouring galaxy and was created from more than 600 snapshots. This stunning, colourful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars, and is spread across roughly 2.5 billion pixels.

With ESA’s EarthCARE satellite and four measuring instruments all working extremely well and fully commissioned, the mission’s ‘first level’ data stream is now freely available.

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This is a new artist’s animation of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.

There is an increasing willingness in the space sector to tackle the problem of space debris. Yet much of the required technology to mitigate or prevent its risks is still missing.

Three InCubed satellites have launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, highlighting ESA’s role as partner to industry and its support for business and technology innovation.

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Fly over Mercury with BepiColombo for the final time during the mission’s epic expedition around the Sun. The ESA/JAXA spacecraft captured these images of the Solar System's smallest planet on 7 and 8 January 2025, before and during its sixth encounter with Mercury. This was its final planetary flyby until it enters orbit around the planet in late 2026.  

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton has detected rapidly fluctuating X-rays coming from the very edge of a supermassive black hole in the heart of a nearby galaxy. The results paint a fascinating picture that defies how we thought matter falls into such black holes, and points to a potential source of gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission, LISA, could see.

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Watch the replay of ESA's start-of-the-year press briefing looking ahead to 2025.

On 8 January 2025, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission flew past Mercury for the sixth time, successfully completing the final ‘gravity assist manoeuvre’ needed to steer it into orbit around the planet in late 2026. The spacecraft flew just a few hundred kilometres above the planet's north pole. Close-up images expose possibly icy craters whose floors are in permanent shadow, and the vast sunlit northern plains.

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At the start of this new year, we look back at close-up pictures and solar flare data recorded by the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission over the last three years. See and hear for yourself how the number of flares and their intensity increase, a clear sign of the Sun approaching the peak of the 11-year solar cycle. 

Week in images: 18-22 November 2024

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image from 13 November 2024 shows the Lewotobi Laki Laki volcano eruption on the island of Flores in southern Indonesia.

In emergency evacuations, access to reliable information can mean the difference between life and death. As our world faces growing challenges from natural disasters and conflicts, the need for rapid, accurate data during evacuations is vital.

Image: Proba-3: Firing laser!