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: Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula is featured in this colourful radar image captured by Copernicus Sentinel-1. View the full article
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Image: Cool by design 3D printing View the full article
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Video: 00:51:05 ESA’s Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) mission is designed to advance our understanding of the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting incident solar radiation back out to space and trapping infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface. Developed as a cooperation between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), this exciting mission will make a range of different measurements that together will shed new light on the role that clouds and aerosols play in regulating Earth’s delicate temperature balance. With global climate change increasingly affecting our planet, EarthCARE is poised to provide data fo…
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Explore this mission kit to learn more about EarthCARE – ESA’s new mission that will shed new light on the role that clouds and aerosols play in regulating Earth’s climate. View the full article
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Ariane 6 media kit View the full article
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EarthCARE: cloud and aerosol mission View the full article
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Week in images: 25-29 March 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article
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Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission takes us over northern Brazil, where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean. View the full article
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ESA has teamed up with Samsung to launch the first watch face for our Solar System. View the full article
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In the run up to April’s total solar eclipse, ESA-led Solar Orbiter and NASA-led Parker Solar Probe are both at their closest approach to the Sun. They are taking the opportunity to join hands in studying the driving rain of plasma that streams from the Sun, fills the Solar System, and causes dazzlement and destruction at Earth. View the full article
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Video: 00:38:30 ESA Member States met in Paris, France, for the 323rd session of the ESA Council on 26 and 27 March 2024. Watch the replay of the information session in which ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and ESA Council Chair Renato Krpoun share the outcome of the meeting. They gave an update to media about ESA's vision for the European space sector by 2040 and the status of actions provided in the roadmap for the implementation of the Resolution on present and future European Space Transportation. They also addressed the progress made in addressing critical challenges faced by ESA in preparation for the next Ministerial Council in 2025. This includes t…
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ESA’s gamma-ray space telescope Integral has played a decisive role in capturing jets of matter being expelled into space at one-third the speed of light. The material and energy were liberated when huge explosions occurred on the surface of a neutron star. This world-first observation proved to be “a perfect experiment” for exploring astrophysical jets of all descriptions. View the full article
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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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