European Space Agency

Week in images: 22-26 May 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: This radar image from Copernicus Sentinel-1 shows the city of São Paulo and part of the homonymous state in southeast Brazil. View the full article

Video: 00:02:10 Detect, fetch and collect. A seemingly easy task is being tested to find the best strategy to collect samples on the martian surface, some 290 000 km away from home. Testing technologies for Mars exploration is part of the daily job of Laura Bielenberg, an ESA young graduate trainee for the Mars Sample Return campaign. The test takes place at the rock-strewn recreation of the Red Planet at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The nickname of this test site is the ‘Mars Yard’ and is part of the Planetary Robotics Laboratory. The tube is a replica of the sample caches that NASA’s Perseverance rover is leaving on Mars hermetically sealed with precious martian samples inside. They are called RSTA, an acronym of Returnable Sample Tube Assembly, and to most people on Earth they look like lightsabers. Laura is investigating sample tube collection strategies, from autonomous detection to pose estimation of sample tubes on Mars, with a testbed called the RABBIT (RAS Bread Boarding In-house Testbed). The Sample Transfer Arm will need to load the tubes from the martian surface for delivery towards Earth. ESA’s robotic arm will collect them from the Perseverance rover, and possibly others dropped by sample recovery helicopters as a backup. Besides cameras and sensors, the team relies on neural networks to detect the tubes and estimate their pose. Inspired by the way the human brain works, neural networks mimic the way biological neurons signal to one another. More news about the Mars Sample Return campaign on ESA’s To Mars and Back blog. View the full article

Earth’s declining ice is without a doubt one of the clearest signs of climate change. A new high-resolution sea-ice concentration data record has just been released as part of ESA’s Climate Change Initiative – providing new insights of sea ice concentration across the globe. View the full article

Video: 00:12:42 Enjoy a sneak peek of ESA’s new documentary that looks at fire in all its fury - and how satellite technology is helping to mitigate this consequence of climate change. Join us on this journey as we meet the firefighter who fought one of the largest wildfires in his career, climate scientists working with satellite data, and the people on the frontline using these data to aid those affected. The full documentary will be released this summer. View the full article

Image: Mars corner View the full article

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The Arctic, once again at the forefront of climate change, is experiencing disproportionately higher temperature increases compared to the rest of the planet, triggering a series of cascading effects known as Arctic amplification. As concerns continue to grow, satellites developed by ESA have become indispensable tools in understanding and addressing the complex dynamics at play and the far-reaching consequences for the environment and human societies. View the full article

Image: GIF zooming in on globular star cluster View the full article

ESA has been presented the ‘Space for Climate Protection’ Special Award by the International Astronautical Federation during the Global Space Conference on Climate Change – currently taking place in Oslo, Norway. View the full article

Lying in bed for a full 60 days – with one shoulder always touching the mattress – might sound like bliss, but add cycling, spinning and constant medical tests to the equation and it becomes a challenging experience for the sake of human space exploration. View the full article

Video: 00:01:20 Satellites play a vital role in monitoring the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic. Tracking ice lost from the world’s glaciers, ice sheets and frozen land shows that Earth is losing ice at an accelerating rate. Using information from ESA’s ERS, Envisat and CryoSat satellites as well as the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, research led by Tom Slater of the University of Leeds, found that the rate at which Earth has lost ice has increased markedly within the past three decades. Currently, more than a trillion tonnes of ice is lost each year. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to an ice cube measuring 10x10x10 km over Oslo’s skyline. Putting it another way, the amount of ice loss globally is equivalent to 12 000 times the annual water use of the Norwegian capital. The sooner Earth’s temperature is stabilised, the more manageable the impacts of ice loss will be. Continuity in satellite data is the key to predicting future ice losses, and to assist in mitigating the threats posed by sea-level rise, shrinking high mountain glaciers and further climate feedbacks. The Copernicus Expansion missions, CRISTAL, CIMR and ROSE-L have been designed to fill the gaps in current Sentinel capabilities for comprehensive monitoring of changes in the global ice cover. View the full article

The first instrument to directly measure gravity on the surface of an asteroid has undergone testing in ESA’s Mechanical Systems Laboratory. View the full article

Video: 00:03:54 The name of Andreas’s second mission to the Space Station is ‘Huginn’. Inspired by Norse mythology, the name is taken from one of two ravens who serve the god Odin. Called Huginn and Muninn, these two birds sit on Odin’s shoulders and are sent flying across the world at dawn. They return at night to inform him of the many events they have seen and heard. In Old Norse, ‘Huginn’ means ‘thought’ and ‘Muninn’ means ‘mind’ or ‘memory’. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen is going on his first long-duration mission to the International Space Station. Andreas will be the pilot on the SpaceX Crew Dragon that will carry him and the rest of Crew-7 to the Space Station – a first for a European! Representing Europe in space, Andreas will carry out science throughout his mission and bring back the knowledge to Earth, for the benefit of humankind. Visit esa.int/huginn for more information on the Huginn mission. View the full article

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ESA Astronaut Andreas Mogensen will fly to the International Space Station for his second mission called Huginn, in late summer of 2023. It will be a mission of firsts for both Andreas and ESA. View the full article

An advanced broadband satellite that will demonstrate next-generation 5G connectivity by providing high-speed internet services has launched into space. View the full article

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Oslo, Norway’s capital and largest city, and host of the 2023 Global Space Conference on Climate Change, taking place on 23–25 May. View the full article

Adding to the grim list of record ice losses, record air temperatures and record droughts, which have all hit the headlines recently, the temperature of the surface waters of our oceans is also at an all-time high. With an El Niño looming, concerns are that we will soon be facing even worse extremes. Satellites orbiting overhead are being used to carefully track the patterns that lead up to El Niño to further understand and predict the consequences of this cyclic phenomenon against the backdrop of climate change. View the full article

Image: Origami heat shield: reusable for reentries View the full article

Euclid launch kit Interactive infographics and background information to prepare for Euclid’s launch View the full article

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has enabled another long-sought scientific breakthrough, this time for Solar System scientists studying the origins of the water that has made life on Earth possible. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, astronomers have confirmed gas – specifically water vapour – around a comet in the main asteroid belt for the first time, proving that water from the primordial Solar System can be preserved as ice in that region. However, the successful detection of water comes with a new puzzle: unlike other comets, Comet 238P/Read had no detectable carbon dioxide. View the full article

More than three weeks after efforts began to deploy Juice’s ice-penetrating Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna, the 16-metre-long boom has finally escaped its mounting bracket. View the full article

Last month, ESA’s woolly astronaut became Europe's first lunar ‘lamb-bassador’: Shaun the Sheep returned home from his Artemis I mission to a hero's welcome and then was herded off on a celebratory post-flight tour. View the full article

Week in images: 08-12 May 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article