European Space Agency

Image: ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti looks out the window of the cupola while the International Space Station flies above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru. Taken earlier this month, this image captures one of Samantha’s favourite things to do in space – in addition to performing research or spacewalks – looking down on our beautiful planet – and one of the precious last views she’ll get from the Station’s ‘window to the world’, known as the Cupola, as she wraps up the end of her mission Minerva. Samantha and fellow expedition 68 crew members NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins are finally headed home today – weather permitting. Their return, scheduled for earlier in the week, has been delayed due to bad conditions at the landing site, off the coast of Florida, USA. Samantha’s Minerva mission began on 27 April 2022, when she was launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, USA, in the Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom. As part of her Minerva mission, Samantha supported numerous European experiments and many more international experiments in microgravity. These experiments covered a wide range of disciplines. While this mission was not her first to the International Space Station, it was packed full of groundbreaking moments: Samantha completed her first spacewalk in an Orlan suit, outfitting the European Robotic Arm alongside Oleg Artemyev; Samantha assumed the role of Space Station commander on 28 September, making her the fifth European, and first European woman, to hold the leadership position of the International Space Station; becoming the first astronaut to take their science communication to TikTok. Her account became a treasure-trove of glimpses into what life is like aboard the Space Station, engaging her followers’ curiosity in how it worked and what she got up to day-to-day. Read more memories from mission Minerva here. Watch Crew-4's return live on ESAwebTV Channel 2. Crew-4 is scheduled to undock 17:35 CEST (16:35 BST) on Friday 14 October. Splashdown is expected at 22:50 CEST (21:50 BST). View the full article

Week in images: 10-14 October 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Mississippi River, one of the longest rivers in North America, is featured in this multi-temporal radar image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission. View the full article

Seeing how a spacecraft dies View the full article

ESA’s Mars Express has captured the rare moment of Mars’ small moon Deimos passing in front of Jupiter and its four largest moons ­– the focus of ESA’s upcoming Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer launching next year. Celestial alignments like these enable a more precise determination of the martian moons’ orbits. View the full article

Following its unanimous approval by ESA Council on 17 March, the Association Agreement between ESA and the Slovak Republic was signed on 14 June at ESA ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. View the full article

We have now discovered 30 039 near-Earth asteroids in the Solar System – rocky bodies orbiting the Sun on a path that brings them close to Earth’s orbit. The majority of these were discovered in the last decade, showing how our ability to detect potentially risky asteroids is rapidly improving. View the full article

Image: A new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals a remarkable cosmic sight: at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars. Located just over 5000 light-years from Earth, the duo is collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140. Each ring was created when the two stars came close together and their stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) met, compressing the gas and forming dust. The stars’ orbits bring them together about once every eight years; like the rings of a tree’s trunk, the dust loops mark the passage of time. In addition to Webb’s overall sensitivity, its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) is uniquely qualified to study the dust rings. These rings are also called shells by astronomers because they are thicker and wider than they appear in the image. Webb’s science instruments detect infrared light, a range of wavelengths invisible to the human eye. Contributed under both ESA and NASA leadership, Webb’s MIRI instrument detects the longest infrared wavelengths. This means that it can often see cooler objects – including the dust rings – than Webb’s other instruments can. MIRI’s spectrometer also revealed the composition of the dust, formed mostly from material ejected by a type of star known as a Wolf-Rayet star. A Wolf-Rayet star is born with at least 25 times more mass than our Sun and is nearing the end of its life, when it will likely explode as a supernova and then collapse into a black hole. Burning hotter than in its youth, a Wolf-Rayet star generates powerful winds that push huge amounts of gas into space. The Wolf-Rayet star in this particular pair may have shed more than half its original mass via this process. Transforming gas into dust is somewhat like turning flour into bread. It requires specific conditions and ingredients. Hydrogen, the most common element found in stars, can’t form dust on its own. But because Wolf-Rayet stars shed so much mass, they also eject more complex elements typically found deep in a star’s interior, including carbon. The heavy elements in the wind cool as they travel into space and are then compressed where the winds from both stars meet, like when two hands knead dough. Some other Wolf-Rayet systems form dust, but none is known to make rings like Wolf-Rayet 140 does. The unique ring pattern forms because the orbit of the Wolf-Rayet star in WR 140 is elongated, not circular. Only when the stars come close together – about the same distance between Earth and the Sun – and their winds collide is the gas under sufficient pressure to form dust. With circular orbits, Wolf-Rayet binaries can produce dust continuously. The science team thinks WR 140’s winds also swept the surrounding area clear of residual material they might otherwise collide with, which may be why the rings remain so pristine rather than smeared or dispersed. There are likely even more rings that have become so faint and dispersed, not even Webb can see them in the data. Wolf-Rayet stars may seem exotic compared to our Sun, but they may have played a role in star and planet formation. When a Wolf-Rayet star clears an area, the swept-up material can pile up at the outskirts and become dense enough for new stars to form. There is some evidence the Sun formed in such a scenario. Using data from MIRI’s Medium Resolution Spectroscopy mode, the new study provides the best evidence yet that Wolf-Rayet stars produce carbon-rich dust molecules. What’s more, the preservation of the dust shells indicates that this dust can survive in the hostile environment between stars, going on to supply material for future stars and planets. The catch is that while astronomers estimate that there should be at least a few thousand Wolf-Rayet stars in our galaxy, only about 600 have been found to date. These results have been published today in Nature Astronomy. MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (the MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona. [Image Description: The background of this Webb image of star Wolf-Rayet 140 is black. A pair of bright stars dominates the centre of the image, with at least 17 pink-orange concentric dust rings emanating from them. Throughout the scene are a range of distant galaxies, the majority of which are very tiny and red, appearing as splotches.] View the full article

Video: 00:00:07 The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission arrives at its next close approach to the Sun on 12 October 2022 at 19:12 UTC (21:12 CEST). This sequence of images shows the progress of the ESA/NASA spacecraft as it heads inwards on its voyage of discovery. The sequence begins on 20 September and finishes on 10 October. The sequence was taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) using the Full Sun Imager (FSI) telescope, and shows the Sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers. This wavelength is emitted by gas in the Sun’s atmosphere with a temperature of around one million degrees. The colour on this image has been artificially added because the original wavelength detected by the instrument is invisible to the human eye. So much of modern society relies on spacecraft in orbit around Earth to provide essential communications and navigation. Understanding more about the Sun and the ‘space weather’ it generates will help companies operate their satellites around Earth safely and securely. Towards the end of the sequence, the image appears to jump slightly. This happens on the days that EUI was not returning data to Earth. The coloured bar at the top of the image shows the impressive amount of data collected in this period, together with these brief gaps in the data coverage. Depending on where Solar Orbiter is along its orbit, it can take days or weeks for the data it records to be transmitted back to Earth. Data from the current perihelion passage is downlinked within a couple of weeks of it being collected. View the full article

Video: 00:02:22 At Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, a test model of the Ariane 6’s central core has been assembled for the first time. Ariane 6 is the first Ariane rocket to be assembled horizontally, which is simpler and less costly than more traditional vertical assembly. One of the P120C boosters can be seen from different angles during installation, before the rocket’s central core is moved to its launchpad and placed upright in its mobile gantry. With the central core and boosters in place, combined tests validate compatibility between all components of the complete launch system. Access the broadcast quality version of the video. View the full article

The kinetic impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft with the Dimorphos asteroid around its larger Didymos parent body has succeeded in shifting its orbit, meaning humankind’s first planetary defence test has been successful. Observations are continuing of the plume of the debris caused by the collision for as long as possible, as the asteroid system gradually recedes from Earth. View the full article

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is returning to Earth alongside NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins, marking the end of her second mission to the International Space Station, Minerva. Watch Crew-4's return live on ESAwebTV2 from 23:00 CEST (22:00 BST) 12 October. View the full article

Certain estimates of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea-level rise may be over, or even underestimated, after researchers detected a previously unknown source of ice loss variability. In a new paper published in The Cryosphere, researchers using Copernicus Sentinel-1 data, found that glaciers feeding the George VI Ice Shelf speed up by approximately 15% during the Antarctic summer. This is the first time that such seasonal cycles have been detected on land ice flowing into ice shelves in Antarctica. View the full article

Image: A volcano on the Italian island of Stromboli erupted early on Sunday morning, releasing huge plumes of smoke and a lava flow pouring into the sea. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured this image of the aftermath less than five hours after the eruption. View the full article

Week in images: 03-07 October 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

The port town of Fos-Sur-Mer, in the southern part of Bouches-du-Rhône, France, is featured in this image captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2. It is from here where the first Meteosat Third Generation Imager satellite set sail last week on its journey to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. View the full article

Image: Cables, tie-wraps and no step! View the full article

ESA’s flagship Ariane 6 launch vehicle programme has taken a dramatic step towards first flight with the start of a series of hot fire tests of the rocket’s upper stage and its all-new Vinci engine. View the full article

Following unusual seismic disturbances in the Baltic Sea, several leaks were discovered last week in the underwater Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, near Denmark and Sweden. Neither pipeline was transporting gas at the time of the blasts, but they still contained pressurised methane – the main component of natural gas – which spewed out producing a wide stream of bubbles on the sea surface. With the unexplained gas release posing a serious question about the incident’s environmental impact, a suite of complementary Earth observation satellites carrying optical and radar imaging instruments were called upon to characterise the gas leak bubbling in the Baltic. View the full article

Video: 00:05:03 ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will soon complete her second mission to the International Space Station, Minerva. She was launched from Kennedy Space Center in late April, and since then has supported numerous European and international science experiments, as well as taken responsibility for all operations within the US Orbital Segment. In July 2022 she performed her first spacewalk, during which she carried out work in the Russian segment to bring the European Robotic Arm into operation. At the end of September 2022, she became the first European woman to hold the role of crew commander on the Station. This report provides a summary of the Minerva Mission, which will end shortly with Samantha’s return to Earth. View the full article

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Image: Interacting galaxies VV 191 (Webb and Hubble composite image) View the full article

Space applications, technologies and data are ready to accelerate the green transformation of the energy industry. View the full article

Image: ESA opens up View the full article

Video: 00:02:37 On Friday 30 September, ESRIN, our establishment in Italy, welcomed members of the public on site as part of European Researchers' Night. Joining research centres throughout Europe, European Researchers' Night, promoted each year by the European Commission, is targeted at people of all ages who want to know more about science, research, and space exploration. View the full article