European Space Agency

Image: Juice snaps Moon en route to Earth View the full article

Video: 00:09:15 ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) returns to Earth on 19–20 August 2024, to complete the world's first Lunar-Earth gravity assist. Flight controllers will guide the spacecraft past the Moon and then Earth itself, ‘braking’ the spacecraft. This manoeuvre may seem counterintuitive but will allow Juice to take a shortcut via Venus on it's way to Jupiter. Juice has already travelled more than 1000 million km to the giant planet but it still has a long way to go even though Jupiter is on average ‘just’ 800 million km away from Earth. Join us as we explain why Juice's journey to Jupiter is taking sooo long. Read more. View the full article

Image: Sentinel-2C fully loaded View the full article

Φsat-2, ESA’s groundbreaking cubesat designed to revolutionise Earth observation with artificial intelligence, has launched. The cubesat embarked on its journey into space on 16 August at 20:56 CEST (11:56 local time) on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, US, integrated by Exolaunch as part of the Transporter-11 rideshare mission, which also included ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite. View the full article

ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite has been launched, paving the way for a potential constellation of satellites that would provide more frequent data not only to enhance short-term weather forecasts for Arctic nations, but for the world as a whole. View the full article

ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite and Φsat-2 missions are ready for lift-off from Vandenburg, California, with a target launch date of 16 August 2024. View the full article

How the Moon shaped our world: discover our interactive publication View the full article

Image: Firefighters in Greece are battling a rapidly spreading wildfire that has swept across several neighbourhoods in Athens, Greece, on Monday. Thousands of residents have been evacuated as the massive fire reached the suburbs of Athens, with some flames reaching heights of 25 m. This image shows the fires surrounding Athens on 12 August 2024, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. This image has been processed in a way that highlights vegetation in red, while the burned areas can be seen in black. The estimated affected area exceeds 100 sq km. In response to the fires, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service was activated to cover the fire event affecting the Attica Region. Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping was requested to provide an initial rough estimate, as well as emergency mapping of the fire’s extent and damage assessment. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission is based on a constellation of two identical satellites, each carrying an innovative wide swath high-resolution multispectral imager with 13 spectral bands for monitoring changes in Earth’s land and vegetation. View the full article

Video: 00:04:38 The effects of the climate crisis are felt more acutely in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. The weather in the Arctic is not only severe, but it changes extremely quickly. More frequent data are urgently needed to improve weather forecasts for this susceptible polar region. Enter ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite: a brand new prototype mission to show exactly how this can be achieved. The satellite will provide precise, short-term weather forecasts for the Arctic region. It is equipped with a 19-channel cross-track scanning microwave radiometer which will provide high-resolution humidity and temperature soundings of the atmosphere in all weather conditions. The Arctic Weather Satellite is the forerunner of a potential constellation of satellites, called EPS-Sterna, that ESA would build for Eumetsat if this first prototype Arctic Weather Satellite performs well. View the full article

Week in images: 05-09 August 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: The hidden intricacies of Messier 106 View the full article

Build your own Ariane 6 rocket with ESA! Download your printable kit and join the competition. View the full article

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ESA’s star-surveying Gaia mission has again proven to be a formidable asteroid explorer, spotting potential moons around more than 350 asteroids not known to have a companion. View the full article

Mars once hosted a lake larger than any on Earth. The broken-down and dried-up remnants of this ancient lakebed are shown here in amazing detail by ESA’s Mars Express. View the full article

Exactly ten years on since Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, we dig into how the intrepid explorer has transformed our knowledge of comets, revealed some crucial pieces in the Solar System jigsaw puzzle, and shaped how we develop new missions. View the full article

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Polish project astronaut Sławosz Uznański is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station on Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4). View the full article

Atmospheric nitrogen dioxide is a harmful pollutant with significant impacts on air quality, climate and the biosphere. Although satellites have mapped nitrogen dioxide concentrations since the 1990s, their resolution was generally too coarse to pinpoint individual sources like power plants. In a recent study, researchers used imagery from Copernicus Sentinel-2 to observe nitrogen dioxide plumes from power plants for the first time – marking a significant advancement in air pollution monitoring. View the full article

Week in images: 29 July - 02 August 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

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As ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence completes its pre-launch testing, its target asteroids have come into focus as tiny worldlets of their own. A special issue of Nature Communications published this week presents studies of the Didymos asteroid and its Dimorphos moon, based on the roughly five and a half minutes of close-range footage returned by NASA’s DART spacecraft before it impacted the latter body – along with post-impact images from the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube. View the full article

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Video: 00:01:02 ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is coming back to Earth. Our fearless traveller is getting a nudge from Earth this summer, in the first of four ‘gravity assist manoeuvres’ that will put Juice on precisely the right path to arrive at Jupiter with the correct speed and direction in July 2031. This is the second big milestone in Juice’s journey to Jupiter, with the first being the launch into space on 14 April 2023. This second helping hand takes a very different form, with Juice flying past the Moon on 19 August, lining it up to fly past Earth on 20 August. The Earth flyby will line the spacecraft up for a flyby of Venus in summer 2025. Gravity is a fickle friend. These gravity assist flybys are a valuable technique to get Juice to Jupiter with less fuel, but they threaten derailment at any time. ESA mission operators will be keeping a very close eye on the spacecraft as it approaches the Moon-Earth system, making any tiny adjustments needed to keep the spacecraft on the right course. Find out more View the full article