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: At ESA’s mission control, before the launch comes the pre-launch briefing – and the all-important group photo. This is the team that will fly Juice to Jupiter with four planetary flybys of Earth and Venus, then switching orbit from Jupiter to its largest moon, Ganymede, followed by a tour of the icy, complex Jovian system comprising a whopping 35 lunar flybys. Never before has a mission switched orbit from a planet other than our own to one of its moons. Radiation at Jupiter will be extreme. Light at the edge of the solar system will be just 3% of what powers us on Earth. It will be cold. Time delays of up to two hours mean teams are only ever communicating with…
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Image: Ariane 5 flight VA260, Juice mission: fully integrated and ready for rollout at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana View the full article
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Video: 00:12:09 Have you ever wondered what a volcano looks like from space? Today, we’re counting down our picks of the most impressive volcanoes around the world – captured by satellites. Our countdown includes Mount Fuji, Mount Mayon and Mount Vesuvius. Satellites orbiting 800 km above us can monitor volcanoes. They can provide real-time data on volcanic activity and can even help disaster response efforts post-eruption. View the full article
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The explosion of a star is a dramatic event, but the remains that the star leaves behind can be even more dramatic. A new mid-infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides one stunning example. It shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), created by a stellar explosion 340 years ago. View the full article
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Week in images: 03-07 April 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article
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A large mass of Sargassum ‘seaweed’ circling around the Gulf of Mexico may soon wash up along the US west coast near Florida – depending on the right combination of currents and wind. The bloom, which may likely be the largest ever recorded, is so large that it’s visible from space. View the full article
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Image: South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, and surroundings are featured in this image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 21 February 2023. View the full article
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New research reveals that ice being lost from glaciers that flow into lakes in the Himalayas has been significantly underestimated. This discovery has critical implications for predicting the demise of the region’s glaciers and for managing critical water resources. View the full article
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ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, Juice, is planned for launch at 13:15 BST/14:15 CEST on 13 April from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Here’s how to follow the key milestones online. View the full article
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Webb’s infrared image highlights the planet’s dramatic rings and dynamic atmosphere. Following in the footsteps of the Neptune image released in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of the solar system’s other ice giant, the planet Uranus. The new image features dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere. View the full article
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They may be microscopic, but their ability to sequester carbon is phenomenal. We are talking phytoplankton – and scientists working on a project funded by ESA are assessing different aspects of the role that these tiny plants play in the ocean carbon cycle to better understand climate processes. View the full article
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Image: After months practicing with a ‘fake’ Juice spacecraft, teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, today got in touch with the real thing. For the first time, mission engineers connected to the Ariane 5 rocket and inside its fairing the Juice spacecraft, for a dress rehearsal of the all-important “network countdown”. The dress rehearsal is the moment that ESA’s mission control brings together the various partners and elements of the mission for a final fully integrated test before launch. Today, Juice’s signals streamed into ESA’s Space Operations Centre via an umbilical connection that will be disconnected in the moments before liftoff, joine…
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Video: 01:00:04 ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (Juice) will launch from Europe’s Spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana on Thursday 13 April 2023. Watch the replay of this online media briefing to hear more about the mission and the launch itself. Participants will include Olivier Witasse, Juice Project Scientist ; Ruedeger Albat, Head of Ariane 5 Programme at ESA and Alessandro Atzei, Payload System Engineer. View the full article
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Image: Practice makes perfect View the full article
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Image: Juice testing – down to the wire View the full article
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A key focus of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will be Ganymede: Jupiter’s largest moon, and an ideal natural laboratory for studying the icy worlds of the Solar System. View the full article
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Over the past few days, Juice has been transferred to the final assembly building and mounted onto the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it into space. These photos capture the key milestones in this process. View the full article
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ESA welcomed its latest group of astronaut candidates yesterday at its European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, at the start of their one-year basic training to prepare for future space missions. View the full article
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Video: 00:01:00 Discover the top five mysteries ESA’s mission Euclid will help solve. ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. More about Euclid View the full article
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Runoff and river discharge are important components in Earth’s water cycle, but as climate change tightens its grip, heatwaves and instances of drought are increasingly hitting the headlines. One would assume that this hotter weather leads to reduced water runoff, but an innovative way of using information from satellites suggests that this isn’t always the case. View the full article
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Image: ESA's newly selected astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 arrived at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, on 3 April 2023 to begin their 12-month basic training. The group of five candidates, Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber, are part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States in November 2022. The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level of standards in preparation for future space missions. During basic training, this includes learning all about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space…
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ESA is excited to announce a revolutionary new technology that could bring luck to people all over the world: four-leaf clover detection from space. View the full article
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Week in images: 27-31 March 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article
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Video: 00:19:44 The Making of Juice series takes the viewer behind the scenes of the European space industry, space technology and planetary science communities around ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission. Juice has a state-of-the-art science payload comprising remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. This episode focuses on the geophysics instruments, which will explore the moons’ surface and subsurface, probe the atmospheres of Jupiter and its moons, and measure their gravity fields. The GAnymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) will study the tidal deformation of Ganymede and the topography of the surfaces of the icy moons. The Radar for Icy Moons…
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