European Space Agency

Video: 00:04:21 “After Euclid’s lifetime, it will just be floating in space. What if future beings found Euclid? How would they know anything about the humanity of the people?” – Tom Kitching, lead scientist of Euclid’s VIS instrument. The team behind ESA’s Euclid mission has come together to create something special – a personal and collective galaxy-shaped fingerprint painting that has been attached to the spacecraft ready to launch into space. The collaborative nature of the artwork reflects the collaborative nature of the Euclid project overall; in both cases, people have come together to build something unique. The Fingertip Galaxy was created by visual artist Lisa Pettibone and Euclid instrument scientist Tom Kitching. Since the very first fingerprint was pressed down in 2019, over 250 scientists and engineers have contributed to the piece of art. So why a galaxy? Euclid is a galaxy-imaging machine that will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years to make a 3D map of the Universe. The mission’s ultimate aim is to explore dark matter and dark energy. “Although Euclid has always been beautiful in concept and materials, it didn’t really say anything about the people involved and humanity as a whole. We asked ourselves whether we could do something artistic that would speak to people,” says Lisa. Scientists and engineers involved in Euclid were invited to dip their fingertips in paint and make their mark on a large piece of paper. “We wanted something authentic, not perfect, and not shaped too much,” continues Lisa. “The result is a piece of art with a wonderful energy to it that captures all the energy of the people involved.” The artwork was photographed and engraved onto a plaque using lasers at Mullard Space Science Laboratory – the same lasers that are used to etch parts for satellites. The plaque was fixed to Euclid and revealed at a ‘Goodbye Euclid’ event on 1 July 2022, when Euclid left Thales Alenia Space in Turin to head to Cannes for final testing as a complete system. Euclid’s project scientist René Laureijs suggested adding text to the plaque to explain the thoughts behind it. Continuing the artistic nature of the project, poet Simon Barraclough wrote a dedicated poem, from which a short extract was chosen to be etched on to the plaque in a typewriter font that swirls around the galaxy of fingerprints. This video ends with Simon reading part of Since his poem. Lisa summarises the Fingertip Galaxy: “It is adding an element of humanity to a dark, vast space, where as far as we can see there is no other intelligent life.” Credit: Filmmaker/composer: Sam Charlesworth Fingertip Galaxy creators: Tom Kitching and Lisa Pettibone Poet: Simon Barraclough – ‘Unextraordinary Light (For Euclid)’ Special thanks: ESA, Euclid mission team, Mullard Space Science Laboratory Additional media: NASA, @jeremyperkins from unsplash.com View the full article

The quarterly ESA Impact is out now! Welcome to the June quarterly edition of ESA Impact, an interactive showcase of the best images of the last quarter. View the full article

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured this impressive, wide-angled view of Patagonia at the southern end of South America, as well as the Falkland Islands. View the full article

Image: Patagonia View the full article

Image: Copernicus Sentinel-1 maps Bangladesh flood View the full article

Video: 00:29:18 Will we find 2021 QM1 before it finds us? View the full article

Image: Deep within the Sahara Desert lies one of the best-preserved craters on Earth. On Asteroid Day, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the almost-perfectly circular Tenoumer Crater in Mauritania. View the full article

European technology that allows satellite navigation signals to safely guide aircraft down for landing in the majority of Europe’s airports will now be put to use across Africa and the Indian Ocean. ASECNA, the Agency for Air Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar, and ESA today signed an agreement to deploy a Satellite-based Augmentation System (SBAS) across a service region of more than 16.5 million sq. km, one and a half times the size of Europe’s coverage area. View the full article

We are a huge organisation of 5000+ people operating at nine different locations. How do we work together to achieve our goals and fly our missions? View the full article

View the full article

ESA has awarded a contract worth €160 million to Airbus in the UK to build the Earth Explorer FORUM satellite. This exciting new mission will yield unique insight into the planet’s radiation budget and how it is controlled – thereby filling in a critical missing piece of the climate jigsaw. Short for Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring, FORUM is ESA’s ninth Earth Explorer mission. View the full article

Video: 00:01:06 A beautiful sequence of 56 images taken by the monitoring cameras on board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission as the spacecraft made its second close flyby of its destination planet Mercury on 23 June 2022. The compilation includes images from two monitoring cameras (MCAM) onboard the Mercury Transfer Module, which provides black-and-white snapshots at 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution. The MCAMs also capture parts of the spacecraft: MCAM-2 sees the Mercury Planetary Orbiter’s medium-gain antenna and magnetometer boom, while the high-gain antenna is in the MCAM-3 field-of-view. The image sequences lasted about 15 minutes starting soon after closest approach to Mercury, which was at an altitude of 200 km. The first sequence showcases images taken by MCAM-2, starting from a distance of around 920 km from the surface of the planet and finishing at about 6099 km. The second sequence shows images from MCAM-3 covering a similar distance range (approximately 984 km – 6194 km). Since MCAM-2 and MCAM-3 are located on either side of the spacecraft, and the image acquisition alternated quickly between the two cameras with about 15-20 seconds between them, the final sequence shows a composite of the two views, giving an impression of the complete planet receding behind the spacecraft. During the flyby it was possible to identify various geological features that BepiColombo will study in more detail once in orbit around the planet. While craters dominate the landscape, numerous volcanic plains can also be made out, as well as roughly linear ‘scarps’ – cliff-like features created by tectonic faulting. In this flyby, the planet’s largest impact basin Caloris was seen for the first time by BepiColombo, its highly-reflective lavas on its floor making it stand out against the darker background as it rotated into the MCAM-2 field of view. The gravity assist manoeuvre was the second at Mercury and the fifth of nine flybys overall. During its seven-year cruise to the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System, BepiColombo makes one flyby at Earth, two at Venus and six at Mercury to help steer it on course to arrive in Mercury orbit in 2025. The Mercury Transfer Module carries two science orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. They will operate from complementary orbits to study all aspects of mysterious Mercury from its core to surface processes, magnetic field and exosphere, to better understand the origin and evolution of a planet close to its parent star. All images are also available in the Planetary Science Archive. Read more about the flyby here. View the full article

Image: The Po River, the longest river in Italy, is hitting record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. This Copernicus Sentinel-2 animation reveals how the river has significantly shrunk between June 2020 and June 2022. View the full article

Week in images: 20-24 June 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Photo highlights from the ‘Space for Earth’ space pavilion at ILA, the Berlin Air and Space Show, from 22 to 26 .June 2022. View the full article

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has made its second gravity assist of planet Mercury, capturing new close-up images as it steers closer towards Mercury orbit in 2025. View the full article

Lake Balkhash, the largest lake in Central Asia, is featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. View the full article

Image: ESA – made of people View the full article

Vital research into health, climate, materials and more continues with ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and colleagues aboard the Space Station this month. Get up to date with what was on their schedule with May’s space science summary. View the full article

Image: Lunar science stirring on Mount Etna View the full article

Levels of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A team of scientists, from the University of Leeds, have used data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite to pinpoint locations with large surges of methane emissions. These findings were presented during ESA’s Living Planet Symposium which took place last month in Bonn, Germany. View the full article

Ariane 5 has delivered two telecommunications satellites, MEASAT-3d and GSAT-24, into their planned geostationary transfer orbits. View the full article

View the full article

Film fans, gamers and future metaverse users will be able to experience high-quality videos, games and extended reality environments live and uninterrupted from anywhere, as satellites link up with terrestrial-based next-generation 5G and 6G connectivity. View the full article

Passengers on board commercial airline easyJet will speed to their destinations faster and greener, thanks to an ESA-backed initiative to digitalise the skies. View the full article