European Space Agency

Video: 00:06:42 Flight VV21 clears the launch pad to begin the inaugural mission of ESA’s new Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. View the full article

ESA’s new Vega-C rocket has completed its inaugural flight, placing main payload LARES-2 – a scientific mission of the Italian Space Agency ASI – into its planned orbit. Six research CubeSats from France, Italy and Slovenia flew as secondary payloads. The launch caps a multi-year effort by ESA, prime contractor Avio and industrial partners in 13 ESA member states to build on the heritage of its predecessor, Vega. View the full article

An ESA-financed nanosatellite, due to lift off aboard the inaugural flight of Vega-C today, will operate an AI system in the harsh, radiation-wracked environment of the Van Allen Belts. The shoebox-sized Trisat-R – one of six ‘CubeSats’ on the flight, headed up to a rarely-trafficked close to 6000 km altitude orbit – is also carrying radiation-detection payloads from CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, Slovenian firm SkyLabs and ESA itself. View the full article

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars in Carina Nebula that were previously obscured. The new images showcase how Webb’s cameras can peer through cosmic dust, shedding new light on how stars form. Objects in earliest, rapid phases of star formation difficult to capture, but Webb’s extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability can chronicle these elusive events. View the full article

Highly anticipated observations hint at treasure trove of discoveries to come The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope’s first full-colour images and spectroscopic data, which uncover a spectacular collection of cosmic features that have remained elusive until now, were released today. View the full article

In this enormous new image, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen details of the galaxy group “Stephan’s Quintet”. Close proximity of the system gives astronomers a ringside seat to galactic mergers and interactions. Webb’s new image also shows in rare detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other and how gas in galaxies is being disturbed and the outflows driven by a black hole in Stephan’s Quintet in a level of detail never seen before. Tight galaxy groups like this may have been more common in the early Universe when superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes. View the full article

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has revealed details of the Southern Ring planetary nebula that were previously hidden from astronomers. View the full article

Webb’s enormous mirror and precise instruments joined forces to capture the most detailed measurements of starlight filtering through the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System to date. The spectrum of light – which contains information about the makeup of a planetary atmosphere 1,150 light-years away – reveals the distinct signature of water. The strength of the signal that Webb detected hints at the significant role the telescope will play in the search for potentially habitable planets in the coming years. Webb’s powerful new view also shows evidence of haze and clouds that previous studies of this planet did not detect. View the full article

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the distant Universe so far. Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast Universe. This sharp near-infrared view has brought out faint structures in extremely distant galaxies, for an unprecedented look at galaxies billions of years in the past. For the first time, Webb has also detailed chemical makeup of galaxies in very early Universe. View the full article

The Ariane 6 launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana now hosts the first example of ESA’s new heavy-lift rocket. This Ariane 6 combined tests model will be used to validate the entire launch system during its ground phase in readiness for the inaugural launch of Ariane 6. View the full article

The international NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the distant Universe so far. U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, during a White House event on Monday 11 July. View the full article

Video: 00:01:48 ESA’s newest launcher stands nearly 35m tall when its four stages and payload are fully stacked. For its inaugural flight, VV21, the main payload is LARES-2, a scientific mission of the Italian space agency, ASI. Access the related broadcast quality video material. View the full article

How can Europe exploit its technical, industrial and financial strengths to ensure it remains a leader in space transportation in the 2030s and beyond? How can ESA, Europe’s national space agencies and institutions, and both established and new industrial partners better co-ordinate their efforts to meet global competition that demands innovation and cost-reduction? These were just a few of the questions discussed during an ESA-hosted roundtable conference held on 27-28 June in Palermo, Sicily. The event, called “Shared Vision for the Future of Space Transportation in Europe”, saw more than 100 representatives of Europe’s space sector discuss the technical and political challenges shaping the space transportation market. View the full article

A 12-strong star-studded advisory group is to guide ESA’s human and robotic space exploration as the agency aims to increase European ambitions in space. View the full article

Vincent Müller, a recent school-leaver, will visit all of ESA’s European sites in the next two weeks. The lucky winner of a free Interrail ticket from the DiscoverEU programme, he decided to use the ticket to make this journey and will share his experiences in a blog to enthuse young people to pursue a career in space. View the full article

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will soon reveal unprecedented and detailed views of the Universe, with the upcoming release of its first full-colour images and spectroscopic data. View the full article

Week in images: 04-08 July 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Discs for fault detection View the full article

ESA’s new medium-lift Vega-C rocket is nearly ready for its inaugural flight. You can follow live on ESA Web TV. Flight VV21 will lift off as soon as 13 July at 13:13 CEST, pending suitable conditions for launch. Broadcast begins 12:45 CEST/11:45 BST on ESA Web TV 13:13 CEST/12:13 BST – liftoff View the full article

Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, part of the Canary Islands lying in the North Atlantic Ocean, are featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. View the full article

Video: 00:43:03 Watch the replay of the Q&A session with the media to learn more about the preparations for the upcoming launch of Vega-C. The inaugural flight of this new rocket in the Vega family is currently planned on 13 July 2022. Speakers include Stefano Bianchi, ESA Head of Flight Programmes Department, Benoit Pouffary, ESA Vega & Space Rider Launch System Engineering Manager, Ettore Scardecchia, Avio Head of Engineering and Mario Cosmo, ASI Director of Science and Research. View the full article

Video: 00:01:50 FedCon is one of Europe's largest science fiction conventions, its 2022 edition held earlier this month in Bonn in Germany. Actors from the many incarnations of Star Trek, as well as Star Wars, Doctor Who, and other science fiction shows met with thousands of fans. ESA has been taking part in FedCon since 2015, with talks, panels, and a stand covering our space science, earth observation, and human exploration missions. At this year's event, scientists and engineers from ESTEC, ESOC, and the EAC gave talks about JWST, Rosetta, mission operations, and careers with ESA. In addition, to help celebrate FedCon's 30th anniversary, ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti sent a special message from her current Minerva mission on the ISS. She was dressed in an outfit worn by flight crew in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series (2004–2009) and wearing the dog tags of famed Viper pilot, Kara "Starbuck" Thrace. Samantha previously appeared as a speaker at FedCon in 2018 and also took part in a 2020 episode of the Space Rocks Uplink vodcast with Katee Sackhoff, who played Starbuck in the series. While we may not yet have invented a faster-than-light drive as used in Battlestar Galactica, ESA turns science fiction into science fact every day, exploring and studying the near-Earth environment, the Solar System, and the Universe beyond, to innovate, inform, and inspire. And we're always happy to share that excitement with our friends around the world, through events like FedCon and much more. View the full article

The ESA astronaut selection has been progressing as planned, with phase two of the selection process ending in March this year, and phase three ending in June. View the full article

With air temperatures in excess of 10°C above the average for the time of year in parts of Europe, the United States and Asia, June 2022 has gone down as a record breaker. The fear is that these extreme early-season heatwaves are a taste of what could soon be the norm as climate change continues to take hold. For those in cities, the heat dissipates slower creating ‘urban heat islands’, which make everyday life even more of a struggle. An instrument, carried on the International Space Station, has captured the recent land-surface temperature extremes for some European cities, including Milan, Paris and Prague. View the full article

In a complex role-played version of a mission to the Moon, controllers at ESOC combined with a team of geological scientists and ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter to oversee a rover’s collection of rock samples. Acting as if he were in lunar orbit, the astronaut was in fact based in a hotel room in Catania, Sicily, with the rover 23 km away and 2 600 m uphill on the volcanic flanks of Mount Etna. As Thomas commanded the rover to pick up rocks his hand experienced just what the robot’s gripper felt – an added dimension in remote control. View the full article