European Space Agency

Video: 00:12:09 Have you ever wondered what a volcano looks like from space? Today, we’re counting down our picks of the most impressive volcanoes around the world – captured by satellites. Our countdown includes Mount Fuji, Mount Mayon and Mount Vesuvius. Satellites orbiting 800 km above us can monitor volcanoes. They can provide real-time data on volcanic activity and can even help disaster response efforts post-eruption. View the full article

The explosion of a star is a dramatic event, but the remains that the star leaves behind can be even more dramatic. A new mid-infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides one stunning example. It shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), created by a stellar explosion 340 years ago. View the full article

Week in images: 03-07 April 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

A large mass of Sargassum ‘seaweed’ circling around the Gulf of Mexico may soon wash up along the US west coast near Florida – depending on the right combination of currents and wind. The bloom, which may likely be the largest ever recorded, is so large that it’s visible from space. View the full article

Image: South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, and surroundings are featured in this image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 21 February 2023. View the full article

New research reveals that ice being lost from glaciers that flow into lakes in the Himalayas has been significantly underestimated. This discovery has critical implications for predicting the demise of the region’s glaciers and for managing critical water resources. View the full article

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, Juice, is planned for launch at 13:15 BST/14:15 CEST on 13 April from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Here’s how to follow the key milestones online. View the full article

Webb’s infrared image highlights the planet’s dramatic rings and dynamic atmosphere. Following in the footsteps of the Neptune image released in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of the solar system’s other ice giant, the planet Uranus. The new image features dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere. View the full article

They may be microscopic, but their ability to sequester carbon is phenomenal. We are talking phytoplankton – and scientists working on a project funded by ESA are assessing different aspects of the role that these tiny plants play in the ocean carbon cycle to better understand climate processes. View the full article

Image: After months practicing with a ‘fake’ Juice spacecraft, teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, today got in touch with the real thing. For the first time, mission engineers connected to the Ariane 5 rocket and inside its fairing the Juice spacecraft, for a dress rehearsal of the all-important “network countdown”. The dress rehearsal is the moment that ESA’s mission control brings together the various partners and elements of the mission for a final fully integrated test before launch. Today, Juice’s signals streamed into ESA’s Space Operations Centre via an umbilical connection that will be disconnected in the moments before liftoff, joined by mission partners Airbus and Arianespace. It is during the network countdown that the Flight Operations Director Andrea Accomazzo performs the well-known ‘final Rollcall’, as he contacts various teams and positions around the globe who each declare – when things are going well – they are “GO” for launch. The dress rehearsal is a live re-enactment of this countdown and every step has to go right to declare launch readiness, from setting up the connection to Juice on the launch pad to establishing ground station links across the globe and ensuring all mission control software and systems are up and running. This rehearsal comes after months of simulations in the Main Control Room, in which teams fly a spacecraft simulator controlled by devious Simulations Officers in the room below. Their job is to think up all the ways that something can go wrong. In this period the teams focussed predominantly on the critical moments after liftoff – the Launch and Early Orbit Phase. Among hundreds of errors, large and small, Juice’s 85 square metre solar arrays failed to deploy, the spacecraft was lost to Earth’s antennas on dozens of occasions and it entered emergency Safe Mode five times. Now that simulations are complete and dozens of worrying scenarios have been worked through, it’s time to focus on a nominal launch. “For the last time we have practiced critical operations for the complex Juice mission – and everything went perfectly to plan. Next time, we’ll be doing this for real”, explains Andrea Accomazzo, Flight Operations Director for the mission. “After speaking to Juice for the first time, we’re ready and couldn’t be more excited for the decade-long conversation about to take place across deep space”. Juice has now been installed in its Ariane 5 rocket, fuelled, and final checks are underway before it is rolled out to the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, for a scheduled launch on 13 April at 13:15 BST (14:15 CEST). The mission, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, will make detailed observations of the giant gas planet and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – with a suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. Juice will characterise these moons as both planetary objects and possible habitats, explore Jupiter’s complex environment in depth, and study the wider Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giants across the Universe. To make all this possible, teams at ESA’s mission control centre in Germany will perform back-to-back critical operations including four planetary flybys to get to Jupiter and 35 flybys of its icy moons. Follow @esaoperations, @esascience and @esa_juice for live updates of Juice’s launch, its long eight-year journey and ultimately the fascinating science it will uncover. View the full article

Video: 01:00:04 ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (Juice) will launch from Europe’s Spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana on Thursday 13 April 2023. Watch the replay of this online media briefing to hear more about the mission and the launch itself. Participants will include Olivier Witasse, Juice Project Scientist ; Ruedeger Albat, Head of Ariane 5 Programme at ESA and Alessandro Atzei, Payload System Engineer. View the full article

Image: Practice makes perfect View the full article

Image: Juice testing – down to the wire View the full article

A key focus of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will be Ganymede: Jupiter’s largest moon, and an ideal natural laboratory for studying the icy worlds of the Solar System. View the full article

Over the past few days, Juice has been transferred to the final assembly building and mounted onto the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it into space. These photos capture the key milestones in this process. View the full article

ESA welcomed its latest group of astronaut candidates yesterday at its European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, at the start of their one-year basic training to prepare for future space missions. View the full article

Video: 00:01:00 Discover the top five mysteries ESA’s mission Euclid will help solve. ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. More about Euclid View the full article

Runoff and river discharge are important components in Earth’s water cycle, but as climate change tightens its grip, heatwaves and instances of drought are increasingly hitting the headlines. One would assume that this hotter weather leads to reduced water runoff, but an innovative way of using information from satellites suggests that this isn’t always the case. View the full article

Image: ESA's newly selected astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 arrived at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, on 3 April 2023 to begin their 12-month basic training. The group of five candidates, Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber, are part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States in November 2022. The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level of standards in preparation for future space missions. During basic training, this includes learning all about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space systems and operations, as well as spacewalk and survival training. This image shows the candidates on their first day at the European Astronaut Centre, alongside ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst, Australian Space Agency astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg and ESA’s Head of Basic and Mission Training Unit Kris Capelle. They are pictured inside the European Columbus module mock-up located in the training hall of the European Astronaut Centre. View the full article

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ESA is excited to announce a revolutionary new technology that could bring luck to people all over the world: four-leaf clover detection from space. View the full article

Week in images: 27-31 March 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:19:44 The Making of Juice series takes the viewer behind the scenes of the European space industry, space technology and planetary science communities around ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission. Juice has a state-of-the-art science payload comprising remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. This episode focuses on the geophysics instruments, which will explore the moons’ surface and subsurface, probe the atmospheres of Jupiter and its moons, and measure their gravity fields. The GAnymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) will study the tidal deformation of Ganymede and the topography of the surfaces of the icy moons. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), is an ice-penetrating radar to study the subsurface structure of the icy moons down to a depth of around nine kilometres. The Gravity & Geophysics of Jupiter and Galilean Moons (3GM), is a radio package that will study the gravity field at Ganymede, the extent of the internal oceans on the icy moons, and the structure of the neutral atmosphere and ionosphere of Jupiter and its moons. The mission will also carry out a Planetary Radio Interferometer & Doppler Experiment (PRIDE), which will use the standard telecommunication system of the spacecraft, together with radio telescopes on Earth to perform precise measurements of the spacecraft position and velocity to investigate the gravity fields of Jupiter and the icy moons. The documentary includes interviews with (in order of appearance): Olivier Grasset, Juice interdisciplinary scientist, Luciano Iess, 3GM principal investigator, Hauke Hussmann, GALA principal investigator, Lorenzo Bruzzone, RIME principal investigator, Leonid Gurvits, PRIDE principal investigator. Access the other episodes of 'The Making of Juice’ Credits: Produced for ESA by Lightcurve Films. View the full article

The flag of Belgium flew proudly over ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands as ESTEC was honoured with a visit by Thomas Dermine, Belgium’s State Secretary for Science Policy, Recovery Program and Strategic Investments, accompanied by new Belgian astronaut Raphaël Liégeois. View the full article

Europe has just endured its second warmest winter on record. Much of southern and western Europe has been affected by substantial anomalies of soil moisture owing to this exceptionally dry and warm winter. Data from ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission have been used to monitor the low levels of soil moisture across Europe. View the full article