European Space Agency
The European Space Agency is an intergovernmental organization of 22 member states dedicated to the exploration of space. Established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, ESA has a worldwide staff of about 2,200
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Image: A citizen scientist digging through data from the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory has found the mission’s 5000th comet. The tiny comet – indicated between the vertical lines in the inset – belongs to the ‘Marsden group’, named after the British astronomer Brian Marsden, who first recognised the group based on SOHO observations. Marsden group comets are thought to be pieces shed by the much bigger Comet 96P/Machholz, which SOHO observes as it passes close to the Sun every 5.3 years. This 5000th comet was discovered by Hanjie Tan, an astronomy PhD student in Prague, Czechia. Hanjie has been comet hunting since he was just 13 years old, discovering over…
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A small, shoebox-sized spacecraft delivered to ESA’s Hera mission this week promises to make a giant leap forward in planetary science. Once deployed from the Hera spacecraft at the Didymos binary asteroid system, the Juventas CubeSat perform the first radar probe within an asteroid, peering deep into the heart of the Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos moonlet. View the full article
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ESA’s Mars Express recently looped around Mars for the 25 000th time – and the orbiter has captured yet another spectacular view of the Red Planet to mark the occasion. View the full article
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When it comes to predicting what our climate will be like in the future, vegetation matters. Plants and trees exert a powerful influence over both the energy cycle and the water cycle. And, crucially, it is estimated that vegetation draws down well over three billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year – this is equivalent to a third of greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity. Accounting for vegetation growth is clearly important in the complex climate puzzle – and the release of a new satellite dataset is set to help climate modellers with the challenge of evaluating the impacts of climate change. View the full article
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Image: In the year 1181 a rare supernova explosion appeared in the night sky, staying visible for 185 consecutive days. Historical records show that the supernova looked like a temporary ‘star’ in the constellation Cassiopeia shining as bright as Saturn. Ever since, scientists have tried to find the supernova’s remnant. At first it was thought that this could be the nebula around the pulsar (dead star) 3C 58. However closer investigations revealed that the pulsar is older than supernova 1181. In the last decade, another contender was discovered; Pa 30 is a nearly circular nebula with a central star in the constellation Cassiopeia. It is pictured here combining images f…
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A team of European scientists have published the most detailed geologic map of Oxia Planum – the landing site for ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover on Mars. This thorough look at the geography and geological history of the area will help the rover scout the once water-rich terrain, in the search for signs of past and present life. View the full article
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Unveiling the all-new ESA Impact: Dive into our Q1 2024 edition Welcome to the 2024 first quarter edition of ESA Impact – your interactive gateway to the most important stories and images from the European Space Agency View the full article
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A newly devised procedure to de-ice Euclid's optics has performed significantly better than hoped. Light coming in to the visible ‘VIS’ instrument from distant stars was gradually decreasing due small amounts of water ice building up on its optics. Mission teams spent months devising a procedure to heat up individual mirrors in the instrument’s complex optical system, without interfering with the finely tuned mission’s calibration or potentially causing further contamination. After the very first mirror was warmed by just 34 degrees, Euclid's sight was restored. View the full article
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The Sun erupted over the weekend, flinging electromagnetic radiation towards Earth, even illuminating skies with spectacular aurora borealis. For the first time, ESA’s unlikely space weather duo of SMOS and Swarm tracked the severe solar storm — which warped Earth’s magnetic field. View the full article
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A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyses them for hints of life. ESA has started to turn this scene into a reality, devising a mission to investigate an ocean world around either Jupiter or Saturn. But which moon should we choose? What should the mission do exactly? A team of expert scientists has delivered their findings. View the full article
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A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyses them for hints of life. ESA has started to turn this scene into a reality, devising a mission to investigate an ocean world around either Jupiter or Saturn. But which moon should we choose? What should the mission do exactly? A team of expert scientists has delivered their findings. View the full article
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Imagine being able to ask a chatbot, “Can you make me an extremely accurate classification map of crop cultivation in Kenya?” or “Are buildings subsiding in my street?” And imagine that the information that comes back is scientifically sound and based on verified Earth observation data. ESA, in conjunction with technology partners, is working to make such a tool a reality by developing AI applications that will revolutionise information retrieval in Earth observation. View the full article
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Image: ESA astronaut candidate Rosemary Coogan lighting a fire during winter survival training in the snowy mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees as part of her basic astronaut training. View the full article
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Image: The striking contrast of the diverse landscape in southeast Kenya is featured in this false-colour image captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2. View the full article
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Video: 00:17:57 Air pollution is the largest environmental health risk in Europe and significantly impacts the health of the European population, particularly in urban areas. Following on from the Sentinel-5P satellite – the first Copernicus mission dedicated to monitoring our atmosphere – the Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 missions will take current air quality measuring capabilities to the next level. Together, the Sentinel-4 and -5 missions will provide information on atmospheric variables in support of European policies. This will include the monitoring of air quality, stratospheric ozone and solar radiation, and climate monitoring. This video features interviews w…
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ESA’s Gaia space telescope has further disentangled the history of our galaxy, discovering two surprising streams of stars that formed and wove together over 12 billion years ago. View the full article
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A few layers of water ice – the width of a strand of DNA – are starting to impact Euclid’s vision; a common issue for spacecraft in the freezing cold of space, but a potential problem for this highly sensitive mission that requires remarkable precision to investigate the nature of the dark Universe. After months of research, Euclid teams across Europe are now testing a newly designed procedure to de-ice the mission's optics. If successful, the operations will validate the mission teams’ plan to keep Euclid’s optical system as ice-free as possible for the rest of its life in orbit. View the full article
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ESA has signed contracts with several European companies for an overall amount of € 233 million to develop Genesis and a LEO-PNT demonstrator, two new missions within the FutureNAV programme that will keep Europe at the forefront of satellite navigation worldwide. View the full article
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Image: Astronomers have created the largest yet cosmic 3D map of quasars: bright and active centres of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. This map shows the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, with the furthest shining bright when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old. The new map has been made with data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. While Gaia’s main objective is to map the stars in our own galaxy, in the process of scanning the sky it also spots objects outside the Milky Way, such as quasars and other galaxies. The graphic representation of the map (bottom right on the infographic) shows us the location of quasars from our van…
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Week in images: 11-15 March 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article
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Image: Laser light sabre View the full article
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Image: The historic centre of Vienna, Austria’s capital city, is featured in this image captured on 23 June 2023. View the full article
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Video: 00:14:13 Climate change exacerbates droughts by making them more frequent, longer, and more severe. This can have a wide range of impacts on the environment, agriculture, ecosystems and communities including water scarcity, crop failure and food shortages. The upcoming Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring, LSTM, mission will improve sustainable agricultural productivity in a world of increasing water scarcity and variability. The mission will carry a high spatial-temporal resolution thermal infrared sensor to provide observations of land-surface temperature. These data are key to understand and respond to climate variability, manage water resource…
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