European Space Agency

An overview of ESA's Space Environment Report 2023 View the full article

Take a journey around ESA’s sites One ESA: a journey through Europe's space program View the full article

The smallest radar to fly in space has been delivered to ESA for integration aboard the miniature Juventas CubeSat, part of ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence. The radar will perform the first radar imaging of an asteroid, peering deep beneath the surface of Dimorphos – the Great Pyramid-sized body whose orbit was shifted last year by the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft. View the full article

Image: Before the vacuum View the full article

Video: 00:03:31 ESA’s Euclid mission will create a 3D-map of the Universe that scientists will use to measure the properties of dark energy and dark matter and uncover the nature of these mysterious components. The map will contain a vast amount of data, it will cover more than a third of the sky and its third dimension will represent time spanning 10 billion years of cosmic history. But dealing with the huge and detailed set of novel data that Euclid observations will produce is not an easy task. To prepare for this, scientists in the Euclid Consortium have developed one of the most accurate and comprehensive computer simulations of the large-scale structure of the Universe ever produced. They named this the Euclid Flagship simulation. Running on large banks of advanced processors, computer simulations provide a unique laboratory to model the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the Universe, such as galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the filamentary cosmic web they form. These state-of-the-art computational techniques allow astrophysicists to trace the motion and behavior of an extremely large number of dark-matter particles over cosmological volumes under the influence of their own gravitational pull. They replicate how and where galaxies form and grow, and are used to predict their distribution across the celestial sphere. Explore the Euclid Flagship simulation in this video and get a sneak preview of the structure of the dark Universe, as we currently model it. New insights will be brought to you by the Euclid mission in the coming years. View the full article

Image: With Portugal in the grip of a heatwave, a wildfire broke out on 5 August south of Odemira in the Alentejo region in southern Portugal. This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission, shows the fire on 7 August. View the full article

According to the World Meteorological Organization, July 2023 is likely to have been the hottest month on record. While much of Europe, North America and Asia suffered the immediate consequences of these brutal temperatures, extreme events are also hitting hard far away in the icy reaches of Antarctica. In a paper published today, scientists highlight Antarctica’s vulnerability to extremes and the role that satellites play in monitoring this remote region. View the full article

Save the date: this year’s annual ESA Open Day in the Netherlands will take place on Sunday 8 October, at the Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk. Registration to attend will be opened later this summer; keep an eye on this webpage and social media for further details. View the full article

Registration is now open for this year’s annual ESA Open Day in the Netherlands for people with a disability, which will take place on Saturday 7 October, at the Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk. View the full article

Video: 00:02:01 In July 2023 local time, the last Ariane 5 blasted off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Relive the moment from up close in this 360° video showing the liftoff and Ariane 5 soaring to orbit. The audio comes from the camera itself that was clamped to a steel cable on a northern ramp surrounding the Ariane 5 flame trench – about 50 m from the ZL3 launchpad. Despite being so close the camera was only protected against the humidity and rain in French Guiana. A solar panel provided extra power to the camera as it had to record for long time to capture the liftoff – no people are allowed so close to the launchpad during the countdown and blastoff. Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket completed its final flight, placing two payloads – the German aerospace agency DLR’s Heinrich Hertz experimental communications satellite and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b – into their planned geostationary transfer orbits. Total payload mass at liftoff was about 7700 kg – 7000 kg for the two satellites, and the rest for payload adapters and carrying structures. The development of the Ariane series of launch vehicles is an expression of Europe’s position, dating to the 1960s, that participation in the new space age demanded an independent launch capability. Several European countries thus joined forces to develop a launch vehicle. This project, called Europa, was ultimately unsuccessful but in 1975 the European Launcher Development Organisation created to oversee it was merged with the European Space Research Organisation to create ESA, which initiated the Ariane programme. That spirit of co-operation ultimately delivered Ariane 5 and the smaller Vega series of launch vehicles. ESA continues this work with its Member States and industrial partners to meet new market realities with Ariane 6, the newest launch vehicle in the Ariane family. "Please accept the website cookies to see the YouTube version and experience the 360VR." View the full article

Video: 00:04:59 The 117th and final launch of Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket capped a series which began in 1996. Commercial, institutional and scientific payloads included such iconic missions as Rosetta, the James Webb Space Telescope and Juice. Seen here is the launch campaign for VA261 on 5 July 2023, to close the Ariane 5 book; onboard were German aerospace agency DLR’s Heinrich Hertz experimental communications satellite and French communications satellite Syracuse 4b. Access the related broadcast quality footage. View the full article

Week in images: 31 July - 04 August 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Right on track: Aeolus reentry map View the full article

Image: Andreas Mogensen during a centrifuge training session View the full article

ESA art posters available! Download here! Iconic space posters: discover our stunning designs! View the full article

In recent weeks, devastating wildfires have spread in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia and Canada, causing human casualties as well as massive environmental and economic damage. While wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, scientists have warned that they are becoming more frequent and more widespread. In response, an upgraded version of ESA’s World Fire Atlas is now available providing a detailed analysis of wildfires across the globe. View the full article

Image: Recycling parts for life on the Moon View the full article

Video: 00:01:35 Aeolus’s mission is over, but weather forecasting is improved forever, and a new precedent has been set for safe satellite reentries. The trailblazing Earth Explorer returned through our atmosphere on 28 July, following the path it was guided on by ESA’s mission control over Earth’s most uninhabited regions, finally disintegrating over the Antarctic. A week-long series of manoeuvres led to this point. They had never been performed before and pushed the satellite to its limits. Aeolus was never designed to fly at such low altitudes – its thrusters and fuel reserves were not made to operate in the thick lower reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. Despite choppy skies and one evening where it seemed the attempt could fail, the successful reentry lowered the already small risk of surviving fragments landing where they shouldn’t. The chance of satellite debris falling on your head is three times less than a meteorite doing the same. Despite this, as our orbital highways get busier and reentries become more common, ESA went above and beyond to lower this even further. By turning Aeolus’s original fate – an uncontrolled, ‘natural’ reentry – into an assisted one, they reduced that risk another 42 times. This animation shows how the final moments for Aeolus could have gone, set to a sonification of Aeolus data, composed by Jamie Perera. Find out more about Aeolus’s final moments in the Rocket Science blog. View the full article

A solar eruption detected simultaneously at Earth, the Moon and Mars emphasises the need to prepare human exploration missions for the dangers of space radiation. View the full article

Huginn Mission Brochure - English A brochure all about the Huginn mission View the full article

Video: 00:33:08 The summer fire season is well under way in Europe – countries all around the Mediterranean are experiencing record temperatures coupled with huge wildfires that have led to mass evacuations. In this enthralling new ESA documentary, explore how people on the frontline are using space to better monitor and fight the flames. Follow the incredible stories of the firefighters who dealt with unprecedented fires in Gironde, France, and the forest officers using satellite data to plan for the forests’ recovery. Journey into the heart of Earth's elemental might and discover how space is changing the game for monitoring volcanic eruptions too – including one of the world’s most studied volcano, Mount Etna. FIRE is the first episode of ESA’s new series centred around the elements and showcases how Earth observation has become crucial to those fighting climate change on the ground. View the full article

Euclid’s two instruments have captured their first test images. The mesmerising results indicate that the space telescope will achieve the scientific goals that it has been designed for – and possibly much more. View the full article

Image: This image shows the irregular galaxy NGC 6822, which was observed by the Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) mounted on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. As their names suggest, NIRCam and MIRI probe different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows the instruments to observe different components of the same galaxy, with MIRI especially sensitive to its gas-rich regions (the yellow swirls in this image) and NIRCam suitable for observing its densely packed field of stars. NGC 6822 lies about 1.5 million light-years away, and is the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbour that is not one of its satellites. It has a very low metallicity, meaning that it contains very low proportions of elements that are not hydrogen and helium. Metallicity is an absolutely key concept in astronomy, in part because elements other than hydrogen and helium are largely produced by stars over their lifetimes. Therefore, in the very early Universe (before the first generation of stars had been born, lived and died) everything had very low metallicity. This makes contemporary low-metallicity objects (like NGC 6822) objects of interest for understanding how processes such as the evolution of stars and the life cycle of interstellar dust likely occurred in the early Universe. This was the motivation for these observations of NGC 6822 with Webb: to better understand how stars form and how dust evolves in low-metallicity environments. The study of NGC 6822 has an interesting history that long predates modern investigations with Webb. It was first discovered by E. E. Barnard, who presented his discovery in a very brief paper in 1884 in The Sidereal Messenger: a short-lived but important American monthly astronomical journal that was published between 1882 and 1891. As with many astronomical objects that appeared diffuse with telescopes of the time, NGC 6822 was miscategorised as an "exceedingly faint nebula". Over the next few years, a series of confusions arose around NGC 6822 over its apparent size, brightness, and even what kind of object it was, because astronomers at the time did not properly account for how different the same object might look with different telescopes. Edwin Hubble, namesake of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space telescope, went on to study NGC 6822 in depth and published a far more detailed paper of his own in 1925. This work was exceptionally important for humanity’s evolving understanding of the Universe, because, in Hubble’s own words: "N.G.C. 6822, [was] the first object definitely assigned to a region outside the galactic system". This paper contributed to solving the debate that was raging amongst astronomers about the extent of the Universe at the time by demonstrating that there were astronomical objects that lay beyond the Milky Way. The study of this galaxy was notably continued by Susan Keyser, who was the first woman to receive a PhD in astronomy from Caltech. Her 1966 thesis remained the most thorough investigation of this galaxy until the 2000s. Now, the study of this key local galaxy is being continued by Webb. Find out more Slider comparison image [Image Description: A dense field of stars with clouds of gas and dust billowing across it. The clouds are patchy and wispy, dense and glowing parts obscuring the centre of the image. Bright galaxies with various shapes and sizes shine through the gas and stars. Some of the star images are a bit larger than the rest, with visible diffraction spikes; two foreground stars are bright in the lower-right corner.] View the full article

An advanced broadband satellite providing high-speed internet services that demonstrate next-generation 5G connectivity has passed its initial in-orbit tests. View the full article

Surpassing scientific expectations and exceeding its planned life in orbit, the Aeolus wind mission has been hailed as one of ESA’s most successful Earth observation missions. And now, its end will go down in history too, thanks to the ingenuity of the Agency’s mission control team who guided this remarkable satellite down to Earth’s atmosphere for a safe reentry. View the full article