European Space Agency

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Video: 00:03:03 On Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 October 2023, the European Space Agency opened the doors to the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, in the Netherlands. Where science meets science fiction, the theme of this year's open day was ‘Science Fiction Gets Real’, highlighting how science fiction has inspired scientists and engineers to join ESA, and turn once imaginary concepts into science fact. The single largest ESA establishment invited the public to meet astronauts, view spacecraft, and peer behind the scenes of Europe’s space adventure, along with a full schedule of events and talks from Space Rocks, celebrating the art and culture of science and space. View the full article

When astronauts return to the Moon, they will take more pictures of the lunar surface than any humans before. To develop the best camera for the job, European astronauts and scientists are lending a helping hand to NASA’s Artemis imagery team. View the full article

The second European Service Module was connected to the rest of the Orion spacecraft which will be used in the Artemis II mission that will bring astronauts around the Moon and back for the first time in over 50 years. View the full article

Launching things into space is hard. Aside from the engines and software, orbital calculations and the launch pad, the tanks that hold the fuel are a masterful example of engineering in their own right – and ESA will soon be testing the next generation of rocket tanks: Phoebus. View the full article

Video: 00:04:41 At some point, statistically speaking, a large asteroid will impact Earth. Whether that’s tomorrow, in ten years, or a problem for our ancestors, ESA is getting prepared. As part of the world’s first test of asteroid deflection, ESA’s Hera mission will perform a detailed post-impact survey of Dimorphos – the 160-metre asteroid struck, and successfully deflected, by NASA’s DART spacecraft. Hera will soon study the aftermath. Launching in October 2024, Hera will turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and hopefully repeatable planetary defence technique. But before Hera and its two CubeSats fly, they’re rigorously tested at ESA’s ESTEC test centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. From the force and noise of the rocket take-off to the sustained vacuum and temperature extremes of deep space, all aspects of Hera’s functioning are checked before they begin their journey, alone in space. View the full article

Week in images: 16-20 October 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Like shining jewels in the water, ships passing through the Panama Canal, which cuts across Central America, have been captured in this Copernicus Sentinel-1 image. View the full article

Video: 01:00:00 ESA Member States met for the 317th session of the ESA Council on 18 and 19 October. Watch the replay of the media briefing in which ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and ESA Council Chair Renato Krpoun share the outcome of the meeting. They give an update to media on plans for ESA to cooperate with the UN’s Environment Programme on the use of Earth observation data and technology for the environment, as well as providing assistance to Poland for its national Earth observation project. They also share the latest plans for a Space Summit to be held on 6 and 7 November in Seville, Spain. View the full article

Image: The scene was set: a research base on the Red Planet was struck by a cyberattack and eight teams on Earth had just a matter of hours to save it. Far from being a farfetched scenario, cyberattacks are unfortunately a daily problem for all sectors, including space exploration, and can have devastating consequences. The ‘Pwn The Rover’ hacking contest was held on 17 October at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, in collaboration with Fraunhofer SIT and ATHENE-Center. Its goal was to bring together, educate and inspire younger generations in the realm of cybersecurity. The hackathon was challenging, really pushing teams in a mix of time-limited and tricky but plausible scenarios; Managing their ‘ExoMy’ rover and defending its systems from other teams' attacks, Attacking competing rovers in order to exploit them, Driving their rover through a mock-up of an abandoned Mars base Unlocking and solving Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges – where strings of code, called ‘flags’, are secretly hidden in purposefully-vulnerable programs or websites. Congratulations to the winning team, “SPAAAAAACE”, from Warsaw University of Technology and University of Potsdam, with an impressive 2000 points! And special mentions also to the runners-up, who came in close behind: pwnthem0le, from Politecnico di Torino, with 1950 points and ENOFLAG, from Technische Universität Berlin and Universität Paderborn, scoring 1800. “Each of the activities were intertwined in some way, so teams couldn’t complete one without giving some attention to the other parts of the contest,” explains Dominic Marszk, Engineer at ESA who co-organised the contest. “This required teams to excel and organise themselves across a much wider than usual area of expertise. The winning teams managed to evolve and apply different tactics throughout the event which resulted in a very fierce competition.” With thanks to all the very impressive teams who participated and everyone who applied for Pwn The Rover 2023: with activities like this and the enthusiasm of all involved, our future in space is looking secure. Stay tuned to @esaoperations on X and LinkedIn for information on the next Hackathon. View the full article

ESA’s navigation testbed vehicle participated in a campaign organised by Norwegian governmental authorities to assess the impact of jamming and spoofing on satnav systems and test innovative technologies for detection and mitigation. View the full article

Week in images: 09-13 October 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: The landscape around the city of Bentiu in South Sudan is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image. View the full article

New research, based largely on information from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and ESA’s CryoSat satellite missions, has revealed alarming findings about the state of Antarctica's ice shelves: 40% of these floating shelves have significantly reduced in volume over the past quarter-century. While this underscores the accelerating impacts of climate change on the world's southernmost continent, the picture of ice deterioration is mixed. View the full article

When astronauts return to the lunar surface they are probably going to be doing more driving than walking – but to keep billowing moondust at bay they are going to need roads. An ESA project reported in today’s Nature Scientific Reports tested the creation of roadworthy surfaces by melting simulated moondust with a powerful laser. View the full article

Video: 00:03:42 Meet Hera, our very own asteroid detective. Together with two CubeSats – Milani the rock decoder and Juventas the radar visionary – Hera is off on an adventure to explore Didymos, a double asteroid system that is typical of the thousands that pose an impact risk to planet Earth. Do Hera and her CubeSats have the right stuff to explore space? Before launch they need to prove it, with a round of testing at the ESTEC Test Centre in the Netherlands – Europe’s largest satellite test facility. Suitable for kids and adults alike, this episode of ‘The Incredible Adventures of Hera’ explains all the tests that Hera has to go through, using facilities that simulate every aspect of launch and spaceflight – from vibration to noise, temperature extremes and space-grade vacuum! Watch the other episodes of The Incredible Adventures of the Hera Mission View the full article

Governments and international disaster response teams have long relied on satellites to assess the impacts of disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Now ESA has partnered with ICEYE, a Finnish microsatellite manufacturer, to improve early warning systems for floods and wildfires and extend their geographical coverage globally. View the full article

Video: 00:03:44 Nestled between the colossal martian ‘Grand Canyon’ (Valles Marineris) and the tallest volcanoes in the Solar System (the Tharsis region) lies Noctis Labyrinthus – a vast system of deep and steep valleys that stretches out for around 1190 km (roughly the length of Italy here on Earth). This video visualises a flight over the eastern part of Noctis Labyrinthus as seen by Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). It presents a perspective view down and across this fascinating landscape, showing distinctive ‘graben’ – parts of the crust that have subsided in relation to their surroundings. The intense volcanism in the nearby Tharsis region is to blame for the formation of these features; this volcanism caused large areas of martian crust to arch upwards and become stretched and tectonically stressed, leading to it thinning out, faulting and subsiding. The highest plateaus seen here represent the original surface level before chunks of surface fell away. The intersecting canyons and valleys are up to 30 km wide and six km deep. In many places, gigantic landslides can be seen covering the valley slopes and floors, while other valley slopes show large dune fields created by sands blown both down and upslope by martian winds. ESA has highlighted Mars Express images of Noctis Labyrinthus before, in 2006 and 2015. Mars Express has orbited the Red Planet since 2003, imaging Mars’s surface, mapping its minerals, studying its tenuous atmosphere, probing beneath its crust, and exploring how various phenomena interact in the martian environment. For more from the mission and HRSC, see ESA's Mars Express releases. Processing notes: The video was created using an image mosaic built over eight orbits (0442, 1085, 1944, 1977, 1988, 10497, 14632 and 16684) by ESA’s Mars Express and its HRSC. This mosaic is combined with topographic information from a digital terrain model to generate a three-dimensional landscape, with every second of the video comprising 50 separate frames rendered according to a pre-defined camera path. The opening credits (Mars globe, first 24 seconds) were created using the recent 20-year Mars global colour mosaic; this opening sequence has a three-fold vertical exaggeration, while the subsequent flight animation has a 1.5-fold exaggeration. Haze has been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model, and starts building up at distance of between 150 and 200 km. The video is centred at the martian coordinates of 7°S, 265°E. Alt-text: The video begins on a rotating full-globe of Mars, with white polar caps and mottled tan surface visible. It then zooms in on the westernmost part of the large Valles Marineris canyon system, a region highlighted by a white box, and swaps to a new Mars Express visualisation of Noctis Labyrinthus. The camera then flies slowly across a landscape that is broken apart by deep intersecting valleys and canyons. View the full article

With many people around the world suffering from various forms of malnutrition it’s important that the absolute basics such as rice, soya and wheat are as nourishing as possible. ESA-funded research shows that the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and the Italian Prisma mission could be used to monitor the nutritional content of staple crops. This could, for example, help farmers take appropriate steps to boost the quality of their crops as they grow. View the full article

Today, ESA's Gaia mission releases a goldmine of knowledge about our galaxy and beyond. Among other findings, the star surveyor surpasses its planned potential to reveal half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, identify over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and pinpoint the positions of more than 150 000 asteroids within the Solar System. View the full article

Andreas Mogensen had a busy first month in space, with plenty of science from sleeping in orbit and capturing pictures of thunderstorms to making chocolate mousse. Here is an overview of Andreas’s first month of science on the Space Station. View the full article

ESA is calling for visionary ideas for how to use a constellation of communication and navigation satellites around the Moon to establish lunar businesses – and unlock opportunities on Earth. View the full article

If you are interested in applying for a job at ESA, curious to know what opportunities we have for you or would like to hear about the projects our teams are working on, then mark your calendar for 9 November 2023! For this fully online event, we will be streaming a programme packed full of sessions giving you an insider’s look at STEM careers at ESA. View the full article

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Week in images: 02-06 October 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article