ESA’s Ariane 6 and Vega-C will soon join the family of launch vehicles operating from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana to guarantee more opportunities for Europe to reach space. The P120C motor, which will power both Ariane 6 and Vega-C, will soon come into operations with the Vega-C inaugural flight.
Today, the European Commission, ESA, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) celebrated the official launch of the Destination Earth initiative: an ambitious project that involves creating a digital replica of Earth to help us move towards a sustainable future.
New views from ESA’s Mars Express reveal fascinating ice-related features in Mars’ Utopia region – home to the largest known impact basin not only on the Red Planet, but in the Solar System.
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On 24 March, over a dozen engineers gathered at Euclid’s industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space in Turin, to carefully attach the two main parts of the Euclid spacecraft together. This task required such extreme precision that it took a whole day, followed by two days of connecting electronic equipment and testing that Euclid’s instruments still work.
ESA is now one step closer to unveiling the mysteries of the dark Universe, following the coming together of two key parts of the Euclid spacecraft – the instrument-carrying payload module and the supporting service module.
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher today underscored the Agency’s determination to ensure that ESA’s work in space is not derailed by the tragic events in Ukraine. Mr Aschbacher stresses that work continues to assess the impact on each ongoing programme, including on missions affected by Roscosmos' withdrawal of Soyuz launch operations from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is launching two pioneering scientific spacecraft this year, one to study the Sun, and one to land on the Moon – the nation’s first soft landing on another celestial body.
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ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is set to embark on an eight-year cruise to Jupiter starting April 2023. The mission will investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the Jupiter system as an archetype for the numerous giant planets now known to orbit other stars.
ESA is going to the Moon – in collaboration with its international partners – and seeks to build a lasting lunar link to enable sustainable space exploration.
The poles of the Moon have emerged as enticing goals for future exploration, given their potential for harbouring water and other volatiles. So ESA and the European Space Resources Innovation Centre, ESRIC, challenged European and Canadian engineering teams to develop vehicles capable of prospecting resources within in these shadowy regions – then put their designs to the test in a realistic lunar analog environment. Five winning teams have now been selected from this challenge, receiving €75 000 contracts each to move their rovers forward to the next phase of the contest.
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The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) will observe the Universe in the near-infrared and mid-infrared – at wavelengths longer than visible light.
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Carrara – an Italian city known especially for its world-famous marble.
Solar Orbiter’s latest images shows the full Sun in unprecedented detail. They were taken on 7 March, when the spacecraft was crossing directly between the Earth and Sun.
Danish ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen has been assigned a long-duration mission to the International Space Station and is expected to fly as the pilot of a Crew Dragon spacecraft in mid 2023 or early 2024.
Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have shown that a part of the Milky Way known as the ‘thick disc’ began forming 13 billion years ago, around 2 billion years earlier than expected, and just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
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