European Space Agency

ESA’s Ariane 6 and Vega-C will soon join the family of launch vehicles operating from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana to guarantee more opportunities for Europe to reach space. The P120C motor, which will power both Ariane 6 and Vega-C, will soon come into operations with the Vega-C inaugural flight. View the full article

Image: A record broken: Hubble finds the most distant star ever seen View the full article

Today, the European Commission, ESA, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) celebrated the official launch of the Destination Earth initiative: an ambitious project that involves creating a digital replica of Earth to help us move towards a sustainable future. View the full article

New views from ESA’s Mars Express reveal fascinating ice-related features in Mars’ Utopia region – home to the largest known impact basin not only on the Red Planet, but in the Solar System. View the full article

Video: 00:04:06 On 24 March, over a dozen engineers gathered at Euclid’s industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space in Turin, to carefully attach the two main parts of the Euclid spacecraft together. This task required such extreme precision that it took a whole day, followed by two days of connecting electronic equipment and testing that Euclid’s instruments still work. Euclid is ESA’s mission to unveil the mysteries of the dark Universe. Read more here. View the full article

ESA is now one step closer to unveiling the mysteries of the dark Universe, following the coming together of two key parts of the Euclid spacecraft – the instrument-carrying payload module and the supporting service module. View the full article

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher today underscored the Agency’s determination to ensure that ESA’s work in space is not derailed by the tragic events in Ukraine. Mr Aschbacher stresses that work continues to assess the impact on each ongoing programme, including on missions affected by Roscosmos' withdrawal of Soyuz launch operations from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. View the full article

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is launching two pioneering scientific spacecraft this year, one to study the Sun, and one to land on the Moon – the nation’s first soft landing on another celestial body. ESA’s global deep-space communication antennas will provide essential support to both missions every step of the way, tracking the spacecraft, pinpointing their locations at crucial stages, transmitting commands and receiving ‘telemetry’ and valuable science data. View the full article

Video: 00:04:25 ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, is set to embark on an eight-year cruise to Jupiter starting April 2023. The mission will investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants and the Jupiter system as an archetype for the numerous giant planets now known to orbit other stars. This animation depicts Juice’s journey to Jupiter and highlights from its foreseen tour of the giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons. It depicts Juice’s journey from leaving Earth’s surface in a launch window 5–25 April 2023 and performing multiple gravity assist flybys in the inner Solar System, to arrival at Jupiter (July 2031), flybys of the Jovian moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, orbital insertion at Ganymede (December 2034), and eventual impact on this moon’s surface (late 2035). An Ariane 5 will lift Juice into space from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou. A series of gravity assist flybys of Earth, the Earth-Moon system and Venus will set the spacecraft on course for its July 2031 arrival at Jupiter. These flybys are shown here in order – Earth-Moon (August 2024), Venus (August 2025), Earth (September 2026, January 2029) – interspersed by Juice’s continuing orbits around the Sun. Juice’s flyby of the Earth-Moon system, known as a Lunar-Earth gravity assist (LEGA), is a world first: by performing this manoeuvre – a gravity assist flyby of the Moon followed just 1.5 days later by one of Earth – Juice will be able to save a significant amount of propellant on its journey. Juice will start its science mission about six months prior to entering orbit around Jupiter, making observations as it approaches its destination. Once in the Jovian system, a gravity assist flyby of Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede – also the largest moon in the Solar System – will help Juice enter orbit around the gas giant. While in Jupiter orbit, the spacecraft will spend four years making detailed observations of Jupiter and three of its largest moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. During the tour, Juice will make two flybys of Europa (in July 2032), which has strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water under its icy shell. Juice will look at the moon’s active zones, its surface composition and geology, search for pockets of liquid water under the surface, and study the plasma environment around Europa, also exploring the moon’s tiny atmosphere and hunting for plumes of water vapour (as have been previously detected erupting to space). A sequence of Callisto flybys will not only be used to study this ancient, cratered world that may too harbour a subsurface ocean, but will also change the angle of Juice’s orbit with respect to Jupiter’s equator, making it possible to investigate the polar regions and environment of Jupiter at higher latitudes (2032–2034). A sequence of Ganymede and Callisto flybys will adjust Juice’s orbit – properly orienting it while minimising the amount of propellant expended – so that it can enter orbit around Ganymede in December 2034, making it the first spacecraft to orbit another planet’s moon. Juice’s initial elliptical orbit will be followed by a 5000 km-altitude circular orbit, and later a 500 km-altitude circular orbit. Ganymede is unique in the Solar System in that it is the only moon to have a magnetosphere. Juice will investigate this phenomenon and the moon’s internal magnetic field, and explore how its plasma environment interacts with that of Jupiter. Juice will also study Ganymede’s atmosphere, surface, subsurface, interior and internal ocean, investigating the moon as not only a planetary object but also a possible habitat. Over time, Juice’s orbit around Ganymede will naturally decay – eventually there will not be enough propellant to maintain it – and it will make a grazing impact onto the surface (late 2035). The animation concludes with an example of what the approach to impact could look like. The Juice launch itself will be a historical milestone for more reasons than one. It will be the final launch for Ariane 5, ending the launcher's nearly three-decade run as one of the world’s most successful heavy-lift rockets. Its duties are being taken over by Ariane 6. Access the related broadcast quality video material. View the full article

ESA is going to the Moon – in collaboration with its international partners – and seeks to build a lasting lunar link to enable sustainable space exploration. View the full article

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The poles of the Moon have emerged as enticing goals for future exploration, given their potential for harbouring water and other volatiles. So ESA and the European Space Resources Innovation Centre, ESRIC, challenged European and Canadian engineering teams to develop vehicles capable of prospecting resources within in these shadowy regions – then put their designs to the test in a realistic lunar analog environment. Five winning teams have now been selected from this challenge, receiving €75 000 contracts each to move their rovers forward to the next phase of the contest. View the full article

Week in images: 21 - 25 March 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:01:00 The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) will observe the Universe in the near-infrared and mid-infrared – at wavelengths longer than visible light. By viewing the Universe at infrared wavelengths with an unprecedented sensitivity Webb will open up a new window to the cosmos. With infrared wavelengths it can see the first stars and galaxies forming after the Big Bang. Its infrared vision also allows Webb to study stars and planetary systems forming inside thick clouds of gas and dust that are opaque to visible light. The primary goals of Webb are to study galaxy, star and planet formation in the Universe. To see the very first stars and galaxies that formed in the early Universe, we have to look deep into space to look back in time (because it takes light time to travel from there to here, the farther out we look, the further we look back in time). The Universe is expanding, and therefore the farther we look, the faster objects are moving away from us, redshifting the light. Redshift means that light that is emitted as ultraviolet or visible light is shifted more and more to redder wavelengths, into the near- and mid-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum for very high redshifts. Therefore, to study the earliest star and galaxy formation in the Universe, we have to observe infrared light and use a telescope and instruments optimised for this light like Webb. Star formation in the local universe takes place in the centres of dense, dusty clouds, obscured from our eyes at normal visible wavelengths. Near-infrared light, with its longer wavelength, is less hindered by the small dust particles, allowing near-infrared light to seep through the dust clouds. By observing the emitted near-infrared light we can penetrate the dust and see the processes leading to star and planet formation. Objects of about Earth's temperature emit most of their light at mid-infrared wavelengths. These temperatures are also found in dusty regions forming stars and planets, so with mid-infrared radiation we can see directly the glow of this slightly warm dust and study its distribution and properties. Webb is an international partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). View the full article

Image: We spy from way up high an ESA astronaut dangling from the International Space Station. Matthias Maurer performed his first spacewalk during his Cosmic Kiss mission yesterday with fellow astronaut Raja Chari of NASA. Extravehicular activity or EVA 80 lasted 6 hours and 54 minutes and was not without some excitement. An hour into the spacewalk, the camera and light assembly on Matthias’ helmet needed some readjustments, which Raja was able to fix using some wiring. The duo were then able to carry on with the tasks, which included installing hoses on a radiator beam valve module that helps regulate Space Station system temperatures, replacing an external camera on the Station’s truss and installing a power and data cable on the Bartolomeo science platform outside ESA’s Columbus module. Matthias’ first task involved routing an ethernet cable along the Space Station’s handrails for the camera installation. He then made his way to the Columbus module to install a data and power cable for Bartolomeo. Bartolomeo is the first European commercial facility to be positioned outside the International Space Station. Built and operated by Airbus, it will offer a high-speed data feed and a unique view of Earth and deep space. Thanks to Matthias’ efforts yesterday, the facility is ready for full operations. Finally, Matthias and Raja worked together to install a new camera. Overall, the duo accomplished all main tasks and headed back to the airlock after nearly seven hours outdoors. Matthias did exceptionally well on his sortie and returned to the Space Station safe and sound. Follow Matthias on his Cosmic Kiss mission on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube the Cosmic Kiss mission page and in regular Space Station updates from ESA. View the full article

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Carrara – an Italian city known especially for its world-famous marble. View the full article

Image: Solar Orbiter tracks solar features during closest approach View the full article

Solar Orbiter’s latest images shows the full Sun in unprecedented detail. They were taken on 7 March, when the spacecraft was crossing directly between the Earth and Sun. View the full article

Danish ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen has been assigned a long-duration mission to the International Space Station and is expected to fly as the pilot of a Crew Dragon spacecraft in mid 2023 or early 2024. View the full article

Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have shown that a part of the Milky Way known as the ‘thick disc’ began forming 13 billion years ago, around 2 billion years earlier than expected, and just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang. View the full article

Image: Turning astronaut urine into fuel on Mars View the full article

With extreme weather events threatening to be more frequent and more severe as the climate crisis takes grip, it’s never been more important to have fast and accurate forecasts. ESA and Eumetsat are working hard to ensure that there will be a constant stream of weather data from space for the next decades and that these data will arrive faster and be more accurate compared to what we have today. It is therefore fitting that on World Meteorological Day, ESA can be assured that the first of the next generation weather satellites, Meteosat Third Generation Imager, has passed a critical set of tests, paving the way for it to be launched in December. View the full article

A newly released Android app will turn your smartphone into an instrument for crowdsourced science. Leave it by your window each night with your satnav positioning turned on and your phone will record small variations in satellite signals, gathering data for machine learning analysis of meteorology and space weather patterns. View the full article

Tune in to ESA Web TV channel 2 from 12:30 CET (11:30 GMT) this Wednesday 23 March to watch ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer’s first spacewalk, known as US EVA 80, live from the International Space Station. View the full article

Video: 00:04:15 ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will return to the International Space Station in April 2022. Her second space mission is known as Minerva. Inspired by Roman mythology, Samantha says the Minerva mission name and patch pay homage to the competence and sophisticated craftmanship of all those who make human spaceflight possible. Samantha will travel to the Station alongside NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob “Farmer” Hines and Jessica Watkins. Collectively known as Crew-4, the astronauts will be launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. When Samantha arrives at the Station, her Minerva mission officially begins. This will see her live and work aboard the orbital outpost for approximately five months. During this time, she will support over 35 European and many more international experiments in orbit. Samantha will also hold the role of US Orbital Segment (USOS) lead, responsible for operations within the US, European, Japanese and Canadian modules and components of the Space Station. As her launch draws closer, Samantha continues her training with International Space Station partners. Stay tuned for the latest updates from her mission and visit the mission web page for more information. Access the related broadcast quality video material. View the full article