European Space Agency

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

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

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 from several telescopes. This composite image uses data across the electromagnetic spectrum and shows a new spectacular view of the supernova remnant. Allowing us to marvel at the same object that appeared in our ancestors’ night sky more than 800 years ago. X-ray observations by ESA’s XMM-Newton (blue) show the full extent of the nebula and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (cyan) pinpoints its central source. The nebula is barely visible in optical light but shines bright in infrared light, collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Space Explorer (red and pink). Interestingly, the radial structure in the image consists of heated sulphur that glows in visible light, observed with the ground-based Hiltner 2.4 m telescope at the MDM Observatory (green) in Arizona, USA, as do the stars in the background by Pan-STARRS (white) in Hawaii, USA. Studies of the composition of the different parts of the remnant have led scientists to believe that it was formed in a thermonuclear explosion, and more precisely a special kind of supernova called a sub-luminous Type Iax event. During this event two white dwarf stars merged, and typically no remnant is expected for this kind of explosion. But incomplete explosions can leave a kind of ‘zombie’ star, such as the massive white dwarf star in this system. This very hot star, one of the hottest stars in the Milky Way (about 200 000 degrees Celsius), has a fast stellar wind with speeds up to 16 000 km/h. The combination of the star and the nebula makes it a unique opportunity for studying such rare explosions. [Image description: A composite image of the remnant of supernova 1181. A spherical bright nebula sits in the middle surrounded by a field of white dotted stars. Within the nebula several rays point out like fireworks from a central star.] View the full article

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 with Giorgio Bagnasco, Sentinel-4 Mission Project Manager, Ben Veilhelmann, Sentinel-4&5 Mission Scientist and Didier Martin, Sentinel-5 Mission Project Manager. Access all "Unpacking Sentinels" videos. View the full article

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

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

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

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 vantage point, the centre of the sphere. The regions empty of quasars are where the disc of our galaxy blocks our view. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies and can be hundreds of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As the black hole’s gravitational pull spins up nearby gas, the process generates an extremely bright disk, and sometimes jets of light, that telescopes can observe. The galaxies that quasars live in sit inside massive clouds of invisible dark matter. The distribution of dark matter gives insight into how much dark matter there is in the Universe, and how strong it clusters. Astronomers compare these measurements across cosmic time to test our current model of the Universe's composition and evolution. Because quasars are so bright, astronomers use them to map out the dark matter in the very distant Universe, and fill in the timeline of how the cosmos evolved. For example, scientists have already compared the new quasar map with the cosmic microwave background, a snapshot of the oldest light in our cosmos. As this light travels to us, it is bent by the intervening web of dark matter – the same web mapped out by the quasars – and by comparing the two, scientists can measure how strongly matter clumps together through time. This map was made by Kate Storey-Fisher of the Donostia International Physics Center in Spain and the New York University, USA, and colleagues, and published in the Astrophysical Journal. It uses data from Gaia’s third data release, which contained 6.6 million quasar candidates, as well as data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Combining the datasets helped clean Gaia’s original dataset of contaminants such as stars and galaxies, and better pinpoint the distances to the quasars. The team also created a map of where dust, stars and other phenomena are expected to block our view of some quasars, which is critical for interpreting the quasar map. View the full article

Week in images: 11-15 March 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Laser light sabre View the full article

Image: The historic centre of Vienna, Austria’s capital city, is featured in this image captured on 23 June 2023. View the full article

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 resources for agricultural production, predict droughts and also to address land degradation. LSTM is one of six Copernicus Sentinel Expansion missions that ESA is developing on behalf of the EU. The missions will expand the current capabilities of the Copernicus Space Component – the world’s biggest supplier of Earth observation data. This video features interviews with Ana Bolea Alamanac, LSTM Mission Project Manager, Ilias Manolis, LSTM Mission Payload Manager and Itziar Barat, LSTM Mission System and Operations Manager. Access all "Unpacking Sentinels" videos. View the full article

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The shoebox-sized Milani CubeSat, which will perform close-up mineral prospecting of the Dimorphos asteroid, is ready for delivery to ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence. The spacecraft will carry Milani and a second CubeSat, the Juventas radar imaging spacecraft for probing into the target asteroid, which together will be ESA’s first CubeSats to operate in deep space. View the full article