Space News & Blog Articles

Week in images: 24-28 October 2022

The first samples to be taken from Mars and sent to Earth will be sourced from Jezero Crater, where the Perseverance rover has been exploring the crater floor and nearby ancient delta.  The location of an initial cache of samples, called Three Forks, is flat and free of obstacles – an ideal spot for a Mars Sample Return landing and pickup operations.

Image: Mini-radar for asteroid CubeSat

Extremely high temperatures recorded this summer caused record melting across Svalbard – one of the fastest warming places on the planet. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured this rare, cloud-free acquisition of the Norwegian archipelago in August 2022.

Image: Ten years: Warsaw at night

Video: 00:01:27

The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has experienced its second close encounter with the Sun. It is delivering more stunning data, and at higher resolution than ever before.

Video: 00:02:56

Meet Hera, our very own asteroid detective. Together with two CubeSats – Milani the rock decoder and Juventas the radar visionary – Hera is off on an adventure to explore Didymos, a double asteroid system that is typical of the thousands that pose an impact risk to planet Earth.

Satellite navigation is headed closer to users. ESA’s Navigation Directorate is planning an in-orbit demonstration with new navigation satellites that will orbit just a few hundred kilometres up in space, supplementing Europe’s 23 222-km-distant Galileo satellites. Operating added-value signals, these novel so-called ‘LEO-PNT’ satellites will investigate a new multi-layer satnav system-of-systems approach to deliver seamless Positioning, Navigation and Timing services that are much more accurate, robust and available everywhere.

This complex region of craters and fractures in the Terra Sirenum region highlights the varied history of Mars.  The image was taken by ESA’s Mars Express on 5 April 2022.

Video: 00:00:23

ESA’s Proba-2 captured two partial solar eclipses on 25 October 2022.

Image: Webb explores a pair of merging galaxies

The Copernicus Sentinel-1C satellite is currently in Cannes undergoing a series of demanding tests in preparation for launch in 2023. The third member of the Sentinel-1 radar family, part of Europe’s Copernicus programme, will continue the critical task of delivering key radar imagery of Earth’s surface for a wide range of services and scientific applications.

Despite being essential to life on Earth, the magnetic field isn’t something we can actually see in itself, or ever hear. But, remarkably, scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have taken magnetic signals measured by ESA’s Swarm satellite mission and converted them into sound – and for something that protects us, the result is pretty scary.

Week in images: 17-21 October 2022

Inhambane Bay, in southeast Mozambique, is featured in this true-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Image: Hubble follow-up of DART impact

Astronomers looking into the early Universe have made a surprising discovery using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s spectroscopic capabilities, combined with its infrared sensitivity, have uncovered a cluster of massive galaxies in the process of formation around an extremely red quasar. The result will expand our understanding of how galaxies in the early Universe coalesced into the cosmic web we see today.

Video: 00:31:00

Watch the replay of our Q&A with the media to learn about the outcomes of the 310th session of the ESA Council. Updates are provided on the ambitious package presented by ESA for the 22/23 November ESA Ministerial Meeting in Paris, but also on the further expansion of ESA memberships, the future of ExoMars, Space Transportation and the overall, delicate economic situation.

After months of effort, astronomers have succeeded in capturing the momentary shadow cast by the Didymos asteroid, from tens of million km away as it passed in front of far-distant stars – a feat of observation only made possible when both the trajectory of the asteroid and the precise location of the stars are known. Even in that case, to have a chance of success, several observers had to be placed in meticulously predicted locations across the path of the shadow, to glimpse the fleeting fading of the star within just a fraction of a second.