European Space Agency

How students built Ireland's first satellite View the full article

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A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail. View the full article

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Video: 00:13:54 A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe. In this programme, the ESA Web TV crew travel back to Turin, Italy to talk to the teams and watch as new tests are being conducted with the rover’s Earth twin Amalia while the real rover remains carefully stored in an ultra-clean room. The 15-minute special programme gives an update on what happened since the mission was cancelled in 2022 because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the plan ahead, the new challenges, the latest deep drilling test and the stringent planetary protection measures in place. ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover has unique drilling capabilities and an on-board science laboratory unrivalled by any other mission in development. Its twin rover Amalia was back on its wheels and drilled down 1.7 metres into a martian-like ground in Italy – about 25 times deeper than any other rover has ever attempted on Mars. The rover also collected samples for analysis under the watchful eye of European science teams. ESA, together with international and industrial partners, is reshaping the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Mission with new European elements, including a lander, and a target date of 2028 for the trip to Mars. The newly shaped Rosalind Franklin Mission will recover one of the original objectives of ExoMars – to create an independent European capability to access the surface of Mars with a sophisticated robotic payload. More information: https://www.esa.int/ExoMars View the full article

Europe’s Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, providing metre-level accuracy and very precise timing to its four billion users. An essential ingredient to ensure this stays the case are the atomic clocks aboard each satellite, delivering pinpoint timekeeping that is maintained to a few billionths of a second. These clocks are called atomic because their ‘ticks’ come from ultra-rapid, ultra-stable oscillation of atoms between different energy states. Sustaining this performance demands, in turn, even more accurate clocks down on the ground to keep the satellites synchronised and ensure stability of time and positioning for users. View the full article

An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted to the Agency’s #SpaceJuice competition in January. View the full article

Image: The icy landscape of Graham Coast, which lies on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image. View the full article

Would you like to know the future of satellite navigation? Try ESA’s Navigation Laboratory. This is a site where navigation engineers test prototypes of tomorrow's user receivers, using simulated versions of the navigation signals planned for the coming decade, such as set to be transmitted from Galileo’s Second Generation satellites. View the full article

Passengers flying on Italy’s national carrier ITA Airways will experience fewer flight delays and greener travel thanks to pilots being able to use satellites to route their planes. View the full article

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The interactive version of the Space Ambition book is now online, featuring all the content and images included in the hardcover edition. View the full article

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Today Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, delivering metre-level accuracy, and if you are a modern smartphone owner then you – like nearly four billion others around the world – are among its users. This week we are celebrating that almost exactly a decade ago, on 12 March 2013, Europe for the first time ever was able to determine a position on the ground using only its own independent navigation system, Galileo. View the full article

A partnership between ESA and PLAYMOBIL continues to inspire and educate children about space. It also helps to support the children’s humanitarian organisation UNICEF and its work with vulnerable children around the world. View the full article

Week in images: 27 February - 03 March 2023 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:45:00 The Independent Enquiry Commission tasked with analysing the loss of the Vega-C Flight VV22 mission shares its findings. View the full article

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image shows Poyang Lake in China’s Jiangxi Province during winter. View the full article

Image: Galactic seascape View the full article

Press Release N° 7–2023 On Tuesday 20 December 2022, Arianespace announced the loss of the Vega-C VV22 mission after its launch at 22h47 local time in French Guiana (2h47 CET/1h47 GMT on 21 December 2022). The mission was carrying two payloads, Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 Earth observation satellites for Airbus Defence and Space. View the full article

Image: Part of an Ariane 5 launcher in a large warehouse View the full article

Image: Atom-scale scan of space materials View the full article

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of rapid changes to the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 545-kilogram spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The primary objective of the NASA mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. Though Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, data from the mission could help inform researchers how to potentially change an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary. View the full article

In 2023, ESA will be recruiting over 200 new colleagues to join our teams and support our mission of the peaceful exploration and use of space for the benefit of everyone. More than 30 vacancies have recently been published and many more will be coming soon, so if you are ready to take the next step in your career, this is your chance! Explore our vacancies and apply today. View the full article

Image: This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the massive galaxy cluster RX J2129. Due to Gravitational lensing, this observation contains three different images of the same supernova-hosting galaxy, which you can see in closer detail here. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light travelling past or through it, almost like a vast lens. In this case, the lens is the galaxy cluster RX J2129, located around 3.2 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Gravitational lensing can cause background objects to appear strangely distorted, as can be seen by the concentric arcs of light in the upper right of this image. Astronomers discovered the supernova in the triply-lensed background galaxy using observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and they suspected that they had found a very distant Type Ia supernova. These supernovae always produce a fairly consistent luminosity — at the same distance, one looks as bright as any other — which makes them particularly helpful to astronomers. As their distance from Earth is proportional to how dim they appear in the night sky, objects with known brightness can be used as 'standard candles' to measure astronomical distances. The almost uniform luminosity of a Type Ia supernova could also allow astronomers to understand how strongly the galaxy cluster RX J2129 is magnifying background objects, and therefore how massive the galaxy cluster is. As well as distorting the images of background objects, gravitational lenses can cause distant objects to appear much brighter than they would otherwise. If the gravitational lens magnifies something with a known brightness, such as a Type Ia supernova, then astronomers can use this to measure the ‘prescription’ of the gravitational lens. This observation was captured by Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera to measure the brightness of the lensed supernova. As part of the same programme, NIRSpec spectroscopy of the supernova was also obtained, which will allow comparison of this distant supernova to Type Ia supernovae in the nearby Universe. This is an important way to verify that one of astronomers’ tried-and-tested methods of measuring vast distances works as expected. [Image description: Stars and galaxies, mostly reddish in colour, are scattered across a dark background. In the foreground upper-right corner, a large elliptical galaxy is surrounded by many smaller similar galaxies in a cluster. These galaxies have bright centres and a diffuse white glow around them. The large galaxy has distorted images and arcs around it.] View the full article