Space News & Blog Articles

ESA's Gaia mission has been collecting data on millions of space objects like stars and asteroids to build an extensive cosmic record. Now, to take it up a notch, it needs your eyes.

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Explore the fascinating landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover in this fly-through video, featuring new views of Jezero crater and its surroundings from ESA’s Mars Express and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The video begins by panning around Jezero crater, which can be seen in the centre background surrounded by textured and cratered terrain. The crater moves into the foreground roughly halfway through, when an outflow channel can be seen snaking away from the crater wall and towards the camera perspective. Two inflow channels (Neretva Vallis and Sava Vallis, found on the western-northwestern rim of Jezero) then become visible; the most prominent of these branches out into the crater to form an ancient fan-shaped river delta that was the landing site for Perseverance.

The Mars Express data come courtesy of the spacecraft’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which has been capturing full-colour, high-resolution snapshots of Mars since 2004 and has mapped over 90% of the planet’s surface. This wealth of information has been essential in the assessment and selection of safe, scientifically useful landing sites on Mars for missions to the planet – including Perseverance, a rover carried to Mars by NASA’s Mars 2020 mission.

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. The diverse rocks, materials, features and mineralogy found in and around Jezero crater tell the story of Mars’ complex geological history. The roughly 45-km-wide crater is found on the border between the ancient region of Terra Sabaea – which contains rocks of up to 4.1 billion years old – and the younger Isidis Planitia basin, which formed via asteroid impact.

Jezero sits next to an intriguing system of faults known as Nili Fossae and a prominent area of volcanism named Syrtis Major, where lava flowed some three billion years ago.

ESA Impact – March 2023 Council edition

Welcome to the March Council edition of ESA Impact, an interactive showcase of the best images and videos since the last Council meeting

The final instalment of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released today. The report warns that the planet has already warmed 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, resulting in more frequent and intense extreme weather events that are causing increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world. 

The report includes a greater contribution of Earth observation data than its previous iterations in providing the physical evidence of Earth’s changing climate system – from sea-level rise, growing greenhouse-gas emissions and melting sea ice.

Image: A close up of an Ariane 5 rocket surrounded by scaffolding. In the centre of the Ariane 5 is the sticker showing the artwork (blue background with Jupiter, three icy moons, Earth and Juice. All are smiling and Jupiter is holding Juice in its hands). Below the artwork is an ESA logo and the Juice mission patch (a round design with an outline of the spacecraft).

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More than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, but what do they look like? ESA’s dedicated exoplanet missions Cheops, Plato and Ariel are on a quest to find out. Cheops will focus its search on mini-Neptunes, planets with sizes between Earth and Neptune, on short orbits around their stars. Cheops will find out how large these planets are, and may detect whether the planets have clouds. Plato will look at all kinds of exoplanets and determine their sizes and ages. Plato’s instruments are so sensitive it may discover the first Earth-like planet on an Earth-like orbit. Finally, Ariel will look at the atmospheres of exoplanets using the technique of transmission spectroscopy and discover what they are made of. Together these missions will discover what exoplanets and their systems look like and they will also reveal how special our own Solar System is.

Week in images: 13-17 March 2023

Discover our week through the lens

Image: Hubble’s neighbourhood watch

Image: Botswana’s Okavango Delta – the world’s largest inland delta – is featured in this multitemporal radar image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission.

How students built Ireland's first satellite

A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail.

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A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe.

In this programme, the ESA Web TV crew travel back to Turin, Italy to talk to the teams and watch as new tests are being conducted with the rover’s Earth twin Amalia while the real rover remains carefully stored in an ultra-clean room.

The 15-minute special programme gives an update on what happened since the mission was cancelled in 2022 because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the plan ahead, the new challenges, the latest deep drilling test and the stringent planetary protection measures in place.

ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover has unique drilling capabilities and an on-board science laboratory unrivalled by any other mission in development. Its twin rover Amalia was back on its wheels and drilled down 1.7 metres into a martian-like ground in Italy – about 25 times deeper than any other rover has ever attempted on Mars. The rover also collected samples for analysis under the watchful eye of European science teams.

ESA, together with international and industrial partners, is reshaping the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Mission with new European elements, including a lander, and a target date of 2028 for the trip to Mars.

Europe’s Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, providing metre-level accuracy and very precise timing to its four billion users. An essential ingredient to ensure this stays the case are the atomic clocks aboard each satellite, delivering pinpoint timekeeping that is maintained to a few billionths of a second. These clocks are called atomic because their ‘ticks’ come from ultra-rapid, ultra-stable oscillation of atoms between different energy states. Sustaining this performance demands, in turn, even more accurate clocks down on the ground to keep the satellites synchronised and ensure stability of time and positioning for users.  

An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted to the Agency’s #SpaceJuice competition  in January.

Image: The icy landscape of Graham Coast, which lies on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.

Would you like to know the future of satellite navigation? Try ESA’s Navigation Laboratory. This is a site where navigation engineers test prototypes of tomorrow's user receivers, using simulated versions of the navigation signals planned for the coming decade, such as set to be transmitted from Galileo’s Second Generation satellites. 

Passengers flying on Italy’s national carrier ITA Airways will experience fewer flight delays and greener travel thanks to pilots being able to use satellites to route their planes.