European Space Agency

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Video: 00:12:18 The level of practical expertise, technical and operational expertise required to operate in such a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment such as space needs to be permanently developed and improved to maintain the technical excellence at the right level. But the constant improvement of the technical and operational knowledge is an exciting journey. Nicolas has experienced this first-hand since he joined the European Space Agency Operation Centre as Ground Station Engineer. As a young engineer at ESA, you can gain extremely valuable expertise through launch campaigns, test and validation campaigns, time at the console in the operation control room together with your team, witnessing and learning from the whole life cycle of a real satellite mission, one impossible thing at the time. With 35 years of experience at ESA, Nicolas Bobrinsky is the former Head of Ground Systems Engineering & Innovation Department. He initiated and further managed the Space Situational Awareness and later the ESA Space Safety Programme. In four episodes of this new series of ESA Masterclass, Nicolas takes us through major events in his career at ESA, covering cornerstone missions, first attempts, overcoming technical challenges, leading diverse teams and solving the unexpected problems that are part of any space endeavour. Access all episodes of ESA Masterclass with Nicolas Brobinsky. Access all ESA Masterclass videos. View the full article

Video: 00:11:18 Imagine you are singing in a choir. You are doing your best, just like everybody else. Suddenly, somebody turns to you and points out that you are not singing the right note. If you are told off in a harsh way, you may feel bad about it, and if this happens too often you might not only feel upset about the choir but might even leave it for good. Eventually, the whole choir could end if everybody just leaves. It is the duty of the choir conductor (the ESA team head) to be able to address every single situation in the right way, to make everyone feel heard and encouraged. In the third video of this new series of ESA Masterclass, Nicolas shares some lessons learned in his decades as a team leader on what it takes to keep a team together through mutual trust and recognition and make all members work in a harmonious way, like singers of a well-tuned choir. With 35 years of experience at ESA, Nicolas Bobrinsky is the former Head of Ground Systems Engineering & Innovation Department. He initiated and further managed the Space Situational Awareness and later the ESA Space Safety Programme. In four episodes of this new series of ESA Masterclass, Nicolas takes us through major events in his career at ESA, covering cornerstone missions, first attempts, overcoming technical challenges, leading diverse teams and solving the unexpected problems that are part of any space endeavour. Access all episodes of ESA Masterclass with Nicolas Brobinsky. Access all ESA Masterclass videos. View the full article

Week in images: 05-09 June 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Cook Strait, which separates New Zealand's North and South Islands. View the full article

Image: Satnav from Earth to the Moon View the full article

Image: ESA’s exoplanet mission Cheops confirmed the existence of four warm exoplanets orbiting four stars in our Milky Way. These exoplanets have sizes between Earth and Neptune and orbit their stars closer than Mercury our Sun. These so-called mini-Neptunes are unlike any planet in our Solar System and provide a ‘missing link’ between Earth-like and Neptune-like planets that is not yet understood. Mini-Neptunes are among the most common types of exoplanets known, and astronomers are starting to find more and more orbiting bright stars. Mini-Neptunes are mysterious objects. They are smaller, cooler, and more difficult to find than the so-called hot Jupiter exoplanets which have been found in abundance. While hot Jupiters orbit their star in a matter of hours to days and typically have surface temperatures of more than 1000 °C, warm mini-Neptunes take longer to orbit their host stars and have cooler surface temperatures of only around 300 °C. The first sign of the existence of these four new exoplanets was found by the NASA TESS mission. However, this spacecraft only looked for 27 days at each star. A hint to a transit – the dimming of light as a planet passes in front of its star from our viewpoint – was spotted for each star. During its extended mission, TESS revisited these stars and the same transit was seen again, implying the existence of planets. Scientists calculated the most likely orbital periods and pointed Cheops at the same stars at the time they expected the planets to transit. During this hit-or-miss procedure Cheops was able to measure a transit for each of the exoplanets, confirming their existence, discovering their true orbital periods and taking the next step in their characterisation. The four newly discovered planets have orbits between 21 and 53 days around four different stars. Their discovery is essential because it brings our sample of known exoplanets closer to the longer orbits that we find in our own Solar System. One of the outstanding questions about mini-Neptunes is what they are made of. Astronomers predict that they have an iron-rocky core with thick outer layers of lighter material. Different theories predict different outer layers: Do they have deep oceans of liquid water, a puffy hydrogen and helium atmosphere or an atmosphere of pure water vapour? Discovering the composition of mini-Neptunes is important to understand the formation history of this type of planet. Water-rich mini-Neptunes probably formed far out in the icy regions of their planetary system before migrating inwards, while combinations of rock and gas would tell us that these planets stayed in the same place as they formed. The new Cheops measurements helped determine the radius of the four exoplanets, while their mass could be determined using observations from ground-based telescopes. Combining the mass and radius of a planet gives an estimate of its overall density. The density can only give a first estimate of the mass of the iron-rocky core. While this new information about the density is an important step forward in understanding mini-Neptunes, it does not contain enough information to offer a conclusion for the outer layers. The four newly confirmed exoplanets orbit bright stars, which make them the perfect candidates for a follow-up visit by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope or ESA’s future Ariel mission. These spectroscopic missions could discover what their atmospheres contain and provide a definitive answer to the composition of their outer layers. A full characterisation is needed to understand how these bodies formed. Knowing the composition of these planets will tell us by what mechanism they formed in early planetary systems. This in turn helps us better understand the origins and evolution of our own Solar System. The results were published in four papers: ‘Refined parameters of the HD 22946 planetary system and the true orbital period of the planet d’ by Z. Garai et al. is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202345943 ‘Two Warm Neptunes transiting HIP 9618 revealed by TESS & Cheops’ by H. P. Osborn et al. is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1319 ‘TESS and CHEOPS Discover Two Warm Sub-Neptunes Transiting the Bright K-dwarf HD15906’ by A. Tuson et al. is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1369 ‘TOI-5678 b: a 48-day transiting Neptune-mass planet characterized with CHEOPS and HARPS’ by S. Ulmer-Moll et al. is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202245478 View the full article

Video: 00:05:05 25 years ago, Copernicus set out to transform the way we see our planet. It is the largest environmental monitoring programme in the world. Learn more about the Copernicus programme and the Sentinel satellite missions developed by ESA. View the full article

Video: 00:13:21 Satellites in orbit underpin our modern lives. They are used in many areas and disciplines, including space science, Earth observation, meteorology, climate research, telecommunication, navigation and human space exploration. However, as space activities have increased, a new and unexpected hazard has started to emerge: space debris. If space debris – uncontrolled human-made objects such as spent upper stages of rockets and pieces of satellites – hits a satellite, it could cause serious damage, which can even end a mission (as has happened in the past). If debris crashes on Earth’s surface, it could potentially hit populated areas. In this second video, Nicolas looks back on the first key steps taken at ESA to develop the Space Safety Programme, devoted to the detection, prevention and mitigation of threats originating from space. This includes not just space debris but also asteroids and space weather. The latter is an intense, occasional energetic storm of particles and material emitted by the Sun. Mitigating these hazards protects our planet, society and economically-important infrastructure on Earth and in orbit. A key element for the forecasting and prevention of space weather is to observe the Sun from the side. Discover more in this second video of the ESA Masterclass with Nicolas Bobrinsky. With 35 years of experience at ESA, Nicolas Bobrinsky is the former Head of Ground Systems Engineering & Innovation Department. He initiated and further managed the Space Situational Awareness and later the ESA Space Safety Programme. In four episodes of this new series of ESA Masterclass, Nicolas takes us through major events in his career at ESA, covering cornerstone missions, first attempts, overcoming technical challenges, leading diverse teams and solving the unexpected problems that are part of any space endeavour. Access all episodes of ESA Masterclass with Nicolas Brobinsky. Access all ESA Masterclass videos. View the full article

Twenty-five years ago, Copernicus set out to transform the way we see our planet. Now, well established as the largest environmental monitoring programme in the world, it returns a whopping 16 terabytes of high-quality data every single day. To mark a quarter-century of European success in space, we look back at a selection of 25 Copernicus highlights. View the full article

Image: First Mars livestream: the movie View the full article

Video: 00:12:38 Innovation is triggered by many drivers. One of these is the constant need for ESA to develop innovative solutions, such as unique spacecraft technologies. In this first video, Nicolas recalls how he and his team had to think outside the box to find a solution for ESA to communicate with Ulysses. The spacecraft was flying around the north pole of the Sun, which is much farther in deep space than satellites had been launched up to that point. The success of this solution motivated the decision to build ESA’s first deep-space communications antennas in New Norcia, in Australia, thus enabling many ESA scientific firsts in deep-space exploration. The antennas would, some decades after, be critically important receivers for the messages sent by the very distant Rosetta probe, on its quest to find and land on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, and other ESA science and exploration missions such as Mars Express, Venus Express and Cassini-Huygens. With 35 years of experience at ESA, Nicolas Bobrinsky is the former Head of Ground Systems Engineering & Innovation Department. He initiated and further managed the Space Situational Awareness and later the ESA Space Safety Programme. In four episodes of this new series of ESA Masterclass, Nicolas takes us through major events in his career at ESA, covering cornerstone missions, first attempts, overcoming technical challenges, leading diverse teams and solving the unexpected problems that are part of any space endeavour. Access all ESA Masterclass videos. View the full article

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Week in images: 29 May - 02 June 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

The food we eat determines how we feel, and nothing beats a good fry-up, although in moderation of course. As we prepare for missions to the Moon and on to Mars, astronauts will be happy to hear from researchers that one staple comfort food is not out of reach, even in space: fries. View the full article

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A new mosaic of Mars marks 20 years since the launch of ESA's Mars Express, and reveals the planet’s colour and composition in spectacular detail. View the full article

Image: A delicate tracery of dust and bright star clusters threads across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The bright tendrils of gas and stars belong to the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, whose bright central bar is visible in the upper left of this image. NGC 5068 lies around 17 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This portrait of NGC 5068 is part of a campaign to create an astronomical treasure trove, a repository of observations of star formation in nearby galaxies. Previous gems from this collection can be seen here and here. These observations are particularly valuable to astronomers for two reasons. The first is because star formation underpins so many fields in astronomy, from the physics of the tenuous plasma that lies between stars to the evolution of entire galaxies. By observing the formation of stars in nearby galaxies, astronomers hope to kick-start major scientific advances with some of the first available data from Webb. The second reason is that Webb’s observations build on other studies using telescopes including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and some of the world’s most capable ground-based observatories. Webb collected images of 19 nearby star-forming galaxies which astronomers could then combine with catalogues from Hubble of 10 000 star clusters, spectroscopic mapping of 20 000 star-forming emission nebulae from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and observations of 12 000 dark, dense molecular clouds identified by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). These observations span the electromagnetic spectrum and give astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to piece together the minutiae of star formation. With its ability to peer through the gas and dust enshrouding newborn stars, Webb is the perfect telescope to explore the processes governing star formation. Stars and planetary systems are born amongst swirling clouds of gas and dust that are opaque to observations in visible light, like many from Hubble or the VLT. The keen vision at infrared wavelengths of two of Webb’s instruments — MIRI and NIRCam — allowed astronomers to see right through the gargantuan clouds of dust in NGC 5068 and capture the processes of star formation as they happened. This image combines the capabilities of these two instruments, providing a truly unique look at the composition of NGC 5068. NGC 5068 MIRI image NGC 5068 NIRCam image [Image description: A close-in image of a spiral galaxy, showing its core and part of a spiral arm. Thousands upon thousands of tiny stars that make it up can be seen, most dense in a whitish bar that forms its core. Clumps and filaments of dust form an almost skeletal structure that follows the twist of the galaxy and its spiral arm. Large, glowing bubbles of red gas are hidden in the dust.] View the full article

Image: From the Chugach Mountains on the right to the Cook Inlet on the left, this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image features the varied landscape surrounding Anchorage, the largest and most populous city in the state of Alaska in the United States. View the full article

Image: 20 years and counting: Mars Express in numbers View the full article

Image: Trial by sound View the full article

Join us live to follow the ‘Ready for the Moon’ event, a high-level political conference on the challenges and ambitions for Europe's space sector. ESA Web TV will broadcast on its Channel Two the conference, including the media briefing on 2 June starting at 14:00 CEST (13:00 BST). View the full article

Earth observation has been essential in identifying and monitoring climate change. Satellite data form the baseline for effective European mitigation and adaptation strategies to support the Green Transition, the European Union to reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, as well as its Green Deal. ESA has now concluded its initial phase of a pilot initiative in Austria that demonstrates the untapped potential of space technologies by providing actionable Earth observation information to accelerate the Green Transition for both society and the economy. View the full article

The main procurements batch of Galileo Second Generation initiated last summer has been finalised, leaving the system ready for its In Orbit Validation development phase. Today, following the opening session of the European Navigation Conference (ENC), ESA Director of Navigation Javier Benedicto invited Thales Alenia Space (Italy), Airbus Defence and Space (Germany) and Thales Six GTS (France) to sign the respective contracts commencing System Engineering Support for the next generation of Europe’s navigation satellite system. View the full article

Everything burns. Given the right environment, all matter can burn by adding oxygen, but finding the right mix and generating enough heat makes some materials combust more easily than others. Researchers interested in knowing more about a type of fire called discrete burning used ESA’s microgravity experiment facilities to investigate. View the full article