European Space Agency

Video: 00:01:18 Teams from ESA, France’s space agency CNES and ArianeGroup successfully completed the disconnection and retraction of the Ariane 6 cryogenic systems on 30 January 2024. These operations mark the start of dismantling the Ariane 6 test model to make way for its first launch. The combined test phase for Ariane 6 using propellants is now over and the European rocket is on track for its inaugural launch. The test model that is on the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, stands 62 m high. It is exactly the same as the ‘production model’ Ariane 6 rockets that will soon be launched, except that its boosters are not tested as part of the complete rocket. For this test, the fuel lines for the upper stage and main stage were disconnected. The yellow arms support the fuel lines that deliver liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to the upper stage that is powered by the Vinci orbital engine. Instead of simply disconnecting the lines, the Ariane 6 teams approached the operations as more tests, or rehearsals, allowing the teams another chance to practice ahead of launch. Seconds before a liftoff, the cryogenic fuelling arms retract from the upper part of the rocket, removing the fuelling lines. The main stage is fuelled from the bottom of the rocket and these lines were also disconnected in the test. View the full article

Black holes are like temperamental toddlers. They spill food all the time, but ESA’s XMM-Newton has caught a black hole in the act of ‘flipping over the table’ during an otherwise civilised meal. This act prevents the galaxy surrounding the black hole from forming new stars, giving us insight into how black holes and galaxies co-evolve. View the full article

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Dedicated to delivering a wealth of new information on exactly how clouds and aerosols affect Earth’s climate, ESA’s EarthCARE satellite has had the chance to show off prior to engineers embarking upon the careful task of packing it up for its journey to the launch site in the US. View the full article

Video: 00:00:36 Join ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt inside the seven-windowed cupola, the International Space Station's "window to the world" and and pan around to enjoy the view. The ESA - European Space Agency-built Cupola is the favourite place of many astronauts on the International Space Station. It serves not only as a unique photo spot, but also for observing robotic activities, arriving spacecraft and spacewalks. Marcus was launched to the International Space Station on the Dragon spacecraft as part of Axiom Mission 3 on 18 January 2024. His two-week mission on board is known as Muninn. Follow Marcus’s journey on the Muninn website, check our launch kit in English or Swedish and connect with Marcus on his Instagram and X accounts. Please accept the website cookies to see the YouTube version and experience the 360VR view. View the full article

Metal 3D printing will soon take place in orbit for the first time. A pioneering European-made metal 3D printer is on its way to the International Space Station on the Cygnus NG-20 resupply mission which launched yesterday. View the full article

A new treasure trove of images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope showcases near- and mid-infrared portraits of 19 face-on spiral galaxies. This new set of exquisite images show stars, gas, and dust on the smallest scales ever observed beyond our own galaxy. Teams of researchers are studying these images to uncover the origins of these intricate structures. The research community’s collective analysis will ultimately inform theorists’ simulations, and advance our understanding of star formation and the evolution of spiral galaxies. View the full article

Galileo, already the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, now meets international standards to guide civil aviation from take-off to landing, complementing Europe’s EGNOS for the most critical operations. Galileo was not designed to comply with these strict safety requirements, so how did engineers at ESA achieve this feat? This is a tale of engineering excellence. View the full article

The first commercial flights of a programme that uses Iris satellite technology to help modernise air traffic management and reduce carbon emissions have taken place. View the full article

Week in images: 22-26 January 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:01:25 Join ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt inside the seven-windowed cupola, the International Space Station's "window to the world". The ESA - European Space Agency-built Cupola is the favourite place of many astronauts on the International Space Station. It serves not only as a unique photo spot, but also for observing robotic activities of the Canadian Space Agency's robotic arm Canadarm2, arriving spacecraft and spacewalks. Marcus was launched to the International Space Station on the Dragon spacecraft as part of Axiom Mission 3 on 18 January 2024. His two-week mission on board is known as Muninn. Follow Marcus’s journey on the Muninn website, check our launch kit in English or Swedish and connect with Marcus on his Instagram and X accounts. View the full article

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Image: Record-breaking Arctic cold weather has swept through much of the United States in the last few weeks. The eastern part of the country was particularly affected with thick snow blanketing most of the region, as this Copernicus Sentinel-3 image shows. View the full article

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Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapour has been detected in its atmosphere. At only approximately twice Earth’s diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy. View the full article

Video: 00:00:20 In November 2023, the A23a mega iceberg set sail after being grounded on the ocean floor for well over 40 years. Now, driven by winds and currents, A23a is heading away from Antarctic waters as seen in this new animation. The iceberg calved from West Antarctica in 1986 but quickly grounded itself in the Weddell Sea where it remained for over four decades. At around 4000 sq km in area, more than four times the size of New York City, and just over 280 m thick, the berg currently holds the title for world’s largest iceberg. The animation uses sea-ice concentration data and shows the iceberg’s movements between 1 November 2023 to 23 January 2024. Similar to many icebergs originating from the Weddell sector, A23a is likely to be expelled into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current – propelling it towards the South Atlantic along a trajectory commonly referred to as ‘iceberg alley’. View the full article

ESA’s next mission to Venus was officially ‘adopted’ today by the Agency’s Science Programme Committee. EnVision will study Venus from its inner core to its outer atmosphere, giving important new insight into the planet's history, geological activity and climate. View the full article

Today, ESA’s Science Programme Committee approved the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the first scientific endeavour to detect and study gravitational waves from space. View the full article

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ESA has teamed up with Xbox and the epic space game Starfield for a spacesuit design competition that is out of this world. View the full article

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A groundbreaking study that combines satellite data and Artificial Intelligence has thrown new light on the number of vessels at sea. Astonishingly, the study reveals that around 75% of the world's industrial fishing vessels have previously been ‘dark’ to public tracking systems. View the full article

Image: This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionised, captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. N79 is typically regarded as a younger version of 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula), another of Webb’s recent targets. Research suggests that N79 has a star formation efficiency exceeding that of 30 Doradus by a factor of two over the past 500 000 years. This particular image centres on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes, dubbed N79 South (S1 for short). The distinct ‘starburst’ pattern surrounding this bright object is a series of diffraction spikes. All telescopes which use a mirror to collect light, as Webb does, have this form of artifact which arises from the design of the telescope. In Webb's case, the six largest starburst spikes appear because of the hexagonal symmetry of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. Patterns like these are only noticeable around very bright, compact objects, where all the light comes from the same place. Most galaxies, even though they appear very small to our eyes, are darker and more spread out than a single star, and therefore do not show this pattern. At the longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI, Webb’s view of N79 showcases the region’s glowing gas and dust. This is because mid-infrared light is able to reveal what is happening deeper inside the clouds (while shorter wavelengths of light would be absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula). Some still-embedded protostars also appear in this field. Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as N79, and have a different chemical composition. Webb is now providing astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in N79 with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies in the early Universe. These observations of N79 are part of a Webb programme that is studying the evolution of the circumstellar discs and envelopes of forming stars over a wide range in mass and at different evolutionary stages. Webb’s sensitivity will enable scientists to detect for the first time the planet-forming dust discs around stars of similar mass to that of our Sun at the distance of the LMC. This image includes 7.7-micron light shown in blue, 10 microns in cyan, 15 microns in yellow, and 21 microns in red (770W, 1000W, 1500W, and 2100W filters, respectively). [Image description: A bright young star within a colourful nebula. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. A number of other bright spots can also be seen in the clouds, which are shown in great detail as layers of colourful wisps.] Release on esawebb.org View the full article

Video: 00:03:52 ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt took off on 18 January 2024 as part of the Axiom-3 crew for a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. After 36 hours catching up to the Space Station, the Dragon docked to the Space Station, the seal between the two tested and finally Marcus started his Muninn mission as he entered the International Space Station. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen along with the rest of the crew of Expedition 70 was waiting to welcome them to space! View the full article

Image: Marcus Wandt entered the International Space Station and started his Muninn mission, an up to 14-day mission. He is the first ESA project astronaut after being chosen for ESA's astronaut reserve in 2022. He launched as part of the Axiom-3 crew together with Michael López-Alegría, Walter Villadei and Alper Gezeravcı. Waiting for him on the Space Station was ESA astronaut and commander of expedition 70, Andreas Mogensen who is on his Huginn mission. View the full article