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ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and Swiss ESA Council Chair Renato Krpoun give an update on the roll-out of decisions taken at the Space Summit in Seville, including the implications for space transportation and progress towards enabling a European commercial provider to deliver supplies to the International Space Station by 2028 and return cargo to Earth. The evolution of the European Spaceport in Kourou is also covered.
Look who's visiting this winter in Orion: Vesta, a bright asteroid with a dark side.
The second phase of the European Union’s Destination Earth initiative has been approved at ESA Council. Destination Earth, also known as DestinE, will build digital models of Earth allowing greater insight into weather and climate dynamics and their impacts on society.
Two new senior staff have been appointed by ESA’s 22 Member States at today’s Council meeting. Laurent Jaffart will become the next Director of Connectivity and Secure Communications and Marco Ferrazzani will become the next Director of Internal Services.
One of the aspects of our study of the universe that fascinates me is the hunt for dark matter. That elusive material that doesn’t interact with much makes it difficult but not impossible to detect. Gravitational lenses are one such phenomena that point to its existence indeed it allows us to estimate how much there is in galaxy clusters. A paper now suggests that observations of Jupiter by Cassini in 2000 suggest we may be able to detect it using planets too.
Like many of you, I loved Deep Impact and Armageddon. Great films, loads of action and of course, an asteroid on collision course with Earth. What more is there to love! Both movies touched upon the options for humanity to try and avoid such a collision but the reality is a little less Hollywood. One of the most common options is to try some sort of single impact style event as was demonstrated by the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission but a new paper offer an intriguing and perhaps more efficient alternative.
This festive holiday telescope deal means you can save 33% on a refractor telescope, well suited to kids and beginners, and you can get it in time for Christmas.
Don't know what to buy a photographer? We've got you covered — find the perfect Christmas gifts for astrophotographers, for all budgets and experience levels.
We all know that to have life on a world, you need three critical items: water, warmth, and food. Now add to that a factor called “entropy”. It plays a role in determining if a given planet can sustain and grow complex life.
In the quest to understand how and where life might arise in the galaxy, astronomers search for its building blocks. Complex Organic Molecules (COMs) are some of those blocks, and they include things like formaldehyde and acetic acid, among many others. The JWST has found some of these COMs around young protostars. What does this tell astronomers?
NASA's MAVEN orbiter has collected data of the unexpected dynamics on Mars, showing how extreme solar events influence the planet's atmosphere, an insight valuable to understanding its evolution.
Ireland has joined the space club with the launch of Eirsat-1, a tiny brick-sized satellite with a big future.
A seamount sitting on a subducting tectonic plate off the coast of Japan and plowing its way into Earth's mantle may be at the root of several magnitude 7 earthquakes in the past 40 years.
After a brief interruption, NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. Problems with one of its gyros put the Hubble into safe mode back on November 19th. Now, the issue has been dealt with, and the world’s most productive space telescope is back online.
One month before SpaceX launches the Ax-3 astronaut mission toward the ISS, Axiom Space's president said he hopes similar missions will become less expensive in the future.
ESA’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover has been delayed twice due to problems with its parachute deployment and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After ESA formally terminated the mission’s cooperation with Roscosmos in July 2022, Europe found a new partner with NASA and the mission appears to be on track for a 2028 launch.
The James Webb Space Telescope has observed record-breaking free-floating "failed star" and two other brown dwarfs. The discovery could help scientists better determine where the line between a planet and a star is drawn.
Astronomy is all about light. Sensing the tiniest amounts of it, filtering it, splitting it into its component wavelengths, and making sense of it, especially from objects a great distance away. The James Webb Space Telescope is especially adept at this, as this new image of supernova remnant (SNR) Cassiopeia A exemplifies so well.
Star formation is happening all around us in the Universe. However, there is still plenty we don’t know about it, including, as a recent press release points out, something that every astronomy textbook points out – we don’t know the size of the smallest star. Most current answers in those textbooks refer to an object known as a brown dwarf, a cross between a star and a giant planet. Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found what is believed to be the smallest brown dwarf ever discovered – and it weighs in at only 3-4 times the weight of Jupiter.
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