Space News & Blog Articles

ESA’s flagship Ariane 6 launch vehicle programme has taken a dramatic step towards first flight with the start of a series of hot fire tests of the rocket’s upper stage and its all-new Vinci engine.

Following unusual seismic disturbances in the Baltic Sea, several leaks were discovered last week in the underwater Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, near Denmark and Sweden. Neither pipeline was transporting gas at the time of the blasts, but they still contained pressurised methane – the main component of natural gas – which spewed out producing a wide stream of bubbles on the sea surface.

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ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will soon complete her second mission to the International Space Station, Minerva.

Diversity and inclusiveness are at the heart of the ESA’s values and are high on the ESA Agenda 2025 as key elements to complete the ESA Transformation. Eight steps, aimed at advancing these values as concrete initiatives, will pave the way for continuous improvement.

Image: Interacting galaxies VV 191 (Webb and Hubble composite image)

Space applications, technologies and data are ready to accelerate the green transformation of the energy industry.

Image: ESA opens up

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On Friday 30 September, ESRIN, our establishment in Italy, welcomed members of the public on site as part of European Researchers' Night.
Joining research centres throughout Europe, European Researchers' Night, promoted each year by the European Commission, is targeted at people of all ages who want to know more about science, research, and space exploration.

Are you ready to join ESA’s initiative to support European space companies to create a constellation of lunar satellites that connect and guide missions to the Moon?

Week in images: 26-30 September 2022

ESA welcomed a record 1700 visitors from 800 companies and institutions to its Industry Space Days event on 28–29 September at ESTEC, its technical centre in The Netherlands. It is a place where industry can meet and share their ideas for new emerging uses of space and commercial potential.

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What do you call three or more space fanatics? Interns.

The first of Europe’s Meteosat Third Generation satellites is now safely aboard a ship and making its way across the Atlantic to French Guiana where it will be readied for liftoff in December. Once launched into geostationary orbit, 36 000 km above Earth, this new satellite, which carries two new extremely sensitive instruments, will take weather forecasting to the next level.

During spring and summer, as the air warms up and the sun beats down on the Greenland Ice Sheet, melt ponds pop up. Melt ponds are vast pools of open water that form on both sea ice and ice sheets and are visible as turquoise-blue pools of water in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

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The final pre-launch preparations for the first Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite are underway. The first satellite, called MTG-I1, built by a European industrial consortium led by Thales Alenia Space carries two imagers: an advanced Flexible Combined Imager  and, in a first for Europe, a Lightning Imager that will allow the earlier detection of storms and extreme weather events, as well as improve aviation safety.  

Swiss watch brand Omega has teamed up with ESA to launch the Marstimer: the first watch to display the time on Earth and Mars. Developed in partnership with ESA’s Mars exploration teams and tested at ESA ESTEC, this new watch is space-tough and Mars-mission ready.

Two of the great space observatories, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a unique experiment to smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid. Observations of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact mark the first time that Webb and Hubble were used to simultaneously observe the same celestial target.

ESA Impact Q3 is now online!

ESA Space Shop is bringing space closer to the people of Rome! The first physical ESA Space Shop concept store mixes space fashion with cosmic in-store experiences and official ESA merchandise.

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Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA's DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more. 

ESA continues to break down barriers and create more opportunities for small companies to get involved in space. Start-up companies and small enterprises offer agile and bespoke development adding value to Europe’s future space economy.