European Space Agency

The European Space Agency is currently looking for a new Director of Connectivity and Secure Communications and new Director of Internal Services to join its executive board and support the Director General, with responsibility for relevant ESA activities and overall objectives. View the full article

The ESA/NASA SOHO observatory has overturned 14 years of thinking about the strange Sun-skirting ‘rock comet’ known as Phaethon that could reopen the mystery of how the Geminid meteor shower was born. View the full article

Not one, but two rocket launches with ESA-led experiments are flying to the edge of space just a week apart, providing unique data to researchers eager to learn more about fundamental physics, semiconductor production, the formation of planets and how our immune cells react to spaceflight. View the full article

Week in images: 17-21 April 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: The historic centre of Rome, Italy’s capital city, is featured in this image captured on 28 March 2023. View the full article

Image: ESA’s technical centre expands View the full article

Global food security is a major challenge in the face of population growth and climate change. One of the first steps in achieving food security for all is to know which crops are growing where and how – each season. Launching today, ESA’s WorldCereal is the world’s first dynamic system capable of providing seasonally updated crop information to help monitor agricultural production across the globe. View the full article

A report, publishing today, states that ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has increased fivefold since the 1990s, and now accounts for a quarter of sea-level rise. View the full article

Making use of the very first resources of another world would be a major feat for our species, bringing us closer to living in space to stay. But reaching such a milestone will take sustained inventiveness and effort – so ESA invites your ideas to help make it happen. View the full article

Press Release N° 18–2023 At the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, USA, on 18 April ESA signed a letter of intent with the Swedish National Space Agency to send an ESA astronaut to visit the International Space Station on an Axiom mission. View the full article

The Euclid satellite embarked on the next leg of the 1.5 million km long journey to space from where it will unlock the mysteries of the dark Universe. View the full article

Every year on 22 April, we’ve celebrated Earth Day and the beautiful planet we call home. Earth Day, established in 1970, has been used to highlight our planet’s environmental challenges and raise awareness of the importance of protecting our world for future generations. But shouldn’t every day be Earth Day? We only have one beautiful planet after all. We hope you enjoy this curated list of 10 of the most remarkable facts about Earth. Scroll to the end of the article to take part in ESA's Earth Day 2023 campaign. View the full article

On 30 April 2023, all nominal operations of Aeolus, the first mission to observe Earth’s wind profiles on a global scale, will conclude in preparation for a series of end of life activities. View the full article

Video: 00:42:00 ESA’s Solar Orbiter may have taken another step towards solving the eighty-year-old mystery of why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is so hot. On 3 March 2022, just a few months into Solar Orbiter’s nominal mission, the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) returned data showing for the first time that a magnetic phenomenon called reconnection was taking place persistently on tiny scales. At that time, the spacecraft was about halfway between the Earth and the Sun. This enabled coordinated observations with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) missions. The data from the three missions was then combined during the analysis. Magnetic reconnection occurs when a magnetic field changes itself into a more stable configuration. It is a fundamental energy release mechanism in superheated gasses known as plasmas and is believed to be the major mechanism for powering large-scale solar eruptions. This makes it the direct cause of space weather, and a prime candidate for the mysterious heating of the Sun’s outer atmosphere. It has been known since the 1940s that the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, is much hotter than the Sun’s surface. While the surface glows at around 5 500°C, the corona is a rarified gas of around 2 million °C. How the Sun injects energy into its atmosphere to heat it to this tremendous temperature has been a major puzzle ever since. In the past, magnetic reconnection has usually been seen during large-scale, explosive phenomena. However, the new result presents ultra-high-resolution observations of persistent small-scale (around 390 km across) reconnection in the corona. These are revealed to be a long-lived ‘gentle’ sequence compared to sudden explosive releases of energy that reconnection is usually associated with. The 3 March 2022 event took place over the period of one hour. The temperatures around the point of the magnetic field where the magnetic field intensity drops to zero, known as the null-point, sustained itself at around 10 million °C, and generated an outflow of material that came in the form of discrete ‘blobs’ travelling away from the null point with a speed of around 80 km/s. In addition to this continuous outflow, an explosive episode also took place around this null point, and lasted for four minutes. Solar Orbiter’s results suggest that magnetic reconnection, at scales that were previously too small to be resolved, proceeds continually in both gentle and explosive ways. This is importantly because it means that reconnection can therefore persistently transfer mass and energy to the overlying corona, contributing to heating it. These observations also suggest that even smaller and more frequent magnetic reconnections await discovery. The goal is now to observe these with EUI at even higher spatio-temporal resolution in the future around Solar Orbiter’s closest approaches to estimate what fraction of the corona’s heat may be transferred in this way. Solar Orbiter’s most recent closest passage to the Sun took place on 10 April 2023. At that time, the spacecraft was just 29 percent the Earth’s distance from the Sun. Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. These results are published in Nature Communications in a paper titled Ultra-high-resolution Observations of Persistent Null-point Reconnection in the Solar Corona. Principal author Prof. Xin Cheng, Nanjing University, China, and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany led an international team of 24 collaborators. View the full article

ESA has signed contracts for two parallel concept studies for commercial-scale Space-Based Solar Power plants, representing a crucial step in the Agency’s new SOLARIS initiative – maturing the feasibility of gathering solar energy from space for terrestrial clean energy needs. View the full article

Image: Juice gets wings View the full article

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has taken its first monitoring camera images showing part of the spacecraft with Earth as a stunning backdrop. The mission launched on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou on 14 April 14:14 CEST and the images were captured in the hours afterwards. View the full article

Video: 02:22:14 Watch a replay of the launch broadcast for ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice. Juice was launched into space on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 13 April 2023, on an eight-year cruise to Jupiter. It will make detailed observations of gas giant Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. The programme includes live segments from the Spaceport and ESA’s European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Access the related broadcast quality video material. View the full article

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 14:14 CEST on 14 April. The successful launch marks the beginning of an ambitious voyage to uncover the secrets of the ocean worlds around giant planet Jupiter. View the full article

Week in images: 10-14 April 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:01:38 ESA’s latest interplanetary mission, Juice, lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, at 14:14 CEST on 14 April 2023 to begin its eight-year journey to Jupiter, where it will study in detail the gas giant planet’s three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Juice – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. This ambitious mission will characterise Ganymede, Callisto and Europa with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the Universe. Following launch, Juice will embark on an eight-year journey to Jupiter, arriving in July 2031 with the aid of momentum and direction gained from four gravity-assist fly-bys of the Earth-Moon system, Venus and, twice, Earth. Flight VA260 is the final Ariane 5 flight to carry an ESA mission to space. Find out more about Juice in ESA’s launch kit View the full article

Data from ESA’s star-mapping Gaia spacecraft has allowed astronomers to image a gigantic exoplanet using Japan's Subaru Telescope. This world is the first confirmed exoplanet found by Gaia’s ability to sense the gravitational tug or ‘wobble’ a planet induces on its star. And the technique points the way to the future of direct exoplanet imaging. View the full article

Video: 00:01:58 Ariane 5 VA 260 with Juice integration and rollout timelapse at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. Juice – Jupiter Icy moons Explorer – is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. This ambitious mission will characterise Ganymede, Callisto and Europa with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the Universe. Following launch, Juice will embark on an eight-year journey to Jupiter, arriving in July 2031 with the aid of momentum and direction gained from four gravity-assist fly-bys of the Earth-Moon system, Venus and, twice, Earth. Flight VA 260 will be the final Ariane 5 flight to carry an ESA mission to space. Find out more about Juice in ESA’s launch kit Access the related broadcast quality video material. View the full article

Image: At ESA’s mission control, before the launch comes the pre-launch briefing – and the all-important group photo. This is the team that will fly Juice to Jupiter with four planetary flybys of Earth and Venus, then switching orbit from Jupiter to its largest moon, Ganymede, followed by a tour of the icy, complex Jovian system comprising a whopping 35 lunar flybys. Never before has a mission switched orbit from a planet other than our own to one of its moons. Radiation at Jupiter will be extreme. Light at the edge of the solar system will be just 3% of what powers us on Earth. It will be cold. Time delays of up to two hours mean teams are only ever communicating with a spacecraft in the past. Ten science instruments need to be oriented precisely, without interference, from hundreds of millions of kilometres away. Juice was made for this extreme environment, and mission control is ready to navigate it. Back-to-back critical operations over the next decade will make this possible. We are GREEN for Juice launch. View the full article

Image: Ariane 5 flight VA260, Juice mission: fully integrated and ready for rollout at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana View the full article