European Space Agency

Could satellites be able to help track and map the marine plastic waste befouling our oceans? Research teams from across Europe returned to a Netherlands-based ocean wave test facility to try and detect floating plastic. Using a suite of microwave and optical instruments, the researchers are assessing if orbital monitoring of plastic might be practical in the future. View the full article

Video: 00:48:00 Embark on a mission with ESA astronomers Mark McCaughrean and Giovanna Giardino to learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope and the early Universe. This programme is suitable for primary and secondary students. Join the quest! Find more educational resources, videos and links about astronomy on ESA Education's Teach with Astronomy webpage. View the full article

The Moon is set to gain one more crater. A leftover SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage will impact the lunar surface in early March, marking the first time that a human-made debris item unintentionally reaches our natural satellite. View the full article

Image: Roof of the satnav world View the full article

You may have heard of the Trojans, two vast swarms of asteroids that lead and trail Jupiter on its orbit around the Sun. But the king of the planets doesn’t hold a monopoly on Trojan asteroids. The physics that gives rise to the formation of these distinctive collections of ancient rocks is the same for all planets – including Earth. While the existence of Earth Trojans had been theorised for many years, the first direct observation of one was confirmed just over a decade ago. Since then, no second Earth Trojan had been discovered – until now. In this Q&A, Toni Santana-Ros (TSR) from the University of Alicante and Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, and Laura Faggioli (LF) from ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) explain the importance and challenges behind the discovery of the second Earth Trojan asteroid. View the full article

The 2022 ESA YGT opportunities are now open for applications. Positions are available in engineering, science, IT and business services. Find out more and apply now. View the full article

Image: ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is all smiles alongside her Crew-4 mates during a training session at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, USA. Samantha is the next ESA astronaut to fly to space and is expected to be launched to the International Space Station in spring 2022. This is the second mission for Samantha who spent approximately 200 days in space in 2015 for her Futura mission. Samantha is launching with familiar faces. Fellow mission specialist Jessica Watkins was part of NASA’s NEEMO 23 crew, in which Samantha served as commander. The team spent 10 days living and working at the world's only undersea research station, Aquarius, located 19 m below the surface of the ocean off the coast of Florida. Upon hearing the announcement, Samantha tweeted her congratulations, saying: “So proud of you, Watty! After sharing the @NASA_NEEMO adventure on NEEMO23, I’m grateful to have you as a crewmate again on #Crew4. It will be fun!” Rounding off Crew-4 are NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren as the commander and Bob “Farmer” Hines as pilot of their SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. This is Kjell’s second flight and Bob’s first. Samantha is the third European astronaut to launch on SpaceX, after Thomas Pesquet in early 2021 and current ESA astronaut-in-space Matthias Maurer in late 2021. Training for Samantha’s second mission has included International Space Station refresher sessions at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Roscosmos’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Moscow. Get #Cristofoready for Samantha’s mission on the blog. View the full article

View the full article

Hibernating astronauts could be the best way to save mission costs, reduce the size of spacecraft by a third and keep crew healthy on their way to Mars. An ESA-led investigation suggests that human hibernation goes beyond the realm of science-fiction and may become a game-changing technique for space travel. View the full article

Video: 00:02:58 Spaceflight participants Yusaku Maezawa and Yozo Hirano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin were welcomed to the International Space Station on 8 December 2021 for a 12 day stay in space. Experience their arrival and farewell in 360° as captured by ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer from within the Russian segment. Also seen in this video are Expedition 66 Commander Anton Shkaplerov, Roscosmos cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron. Matthias was launched to the International Space Station for his six-month ESA mission known as Cosmic Kiss on 11 November 2021. During his time on board, he will support around 35 European and many more international experiments in orbit. This is the German ESA astronaut’s first time in orbit. Follow his journey on social media and via the Cosmic Kiss section of ESA’s web portal. Access the other Cosmic Kiss 360º videos View the full article

Week in images: 24 - 28 January 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Crater tree rings View the full article

The lower stage of ESA’s next-generation Ariane 6 launch vehicle has been installed on the assembly line at Europe’s Spaceport behind the upper stage. It is now time to join the two horizontally to create the central core of Ariane 6 in readiness for the first combined tests on the launch pad. View the full article

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over northwest Lesotho – a small, land-locked country surrounded entirely by South Africa. View the full article

One of the many serious consequences of the climate crisis is that precious permafrost is thawing, and this is unleashing even more carbon to the atmosphere and further exacerbating climate change. However, it’s complicated. For example, sometimes permafrost can thaw rapidly and scientists are unsure why and what these abrupt thaws mean in terms of feedback loops. This makes it difficult to predict the future impact on the climate. Thanks to an ESA–NASA initiative, new research digs deep into understanding the complexities of permafrost thaw and how carbon is released over time. View the full article

View the full article

View the full article

Image: An unusual snowstorm has blanketed parts of Turkey and Greece, causing power cuts and chaos on the roads and flight cancellations. Two images from Copernicus Sentinel-2 show Athens:before and after the snowstorm. View the full article

Image: Astronauts aboard the International Space Station farewelled over 2000 kg of scientific experiments and hardware on Sunday 23 January as a cargo Dragon spacecraft began its return to Earth. ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer captured the resupply vehicle in all its glory as it departed the orbital outpost at 15:40 GMT/16:40 CET. It splashed down approximately 29 hours later off the coast of Florida, USA. The SpaceX spacecraft arrived at the Space Station just before Christmas, bringing new experiments alongside Christmas treats. It returned with a bellyful of science, including several European experiments that were quickly transported to NASA’s Space Station Processing Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and other items that flew with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet during his Alpha mission. Among the experiments were an investigation into the effect of microgravity on resting muscle tone known as Myotones, cell cultures for the Cytoskeleton experiment that looks at how human cells behave in weightlessness, and a new device called Thermo-Mini for continually monitoring core body temperature that you might have seen Matthias sporting on Station. It also transported cargo relating to Microage, which uses synthetic muscle cells to study muscle degradation aboard the International Space Station, the Blob educational experiment that saw students replicate space research in the classroom using a naturally occurring slime mould, and equipment for the Multiscale Boiling experiment Rubi. The next resupply vehicle to fly to the Station is a Northrop Grumman Cygnus, expected to be launched no earlier than 19 February 2022. In the meantime, the astronauts of Expedition 66 continue their busy schedule of science and operations in orbit. See Matthias Maurer’s Cosmic Kiss mission page for the latest news. View the full article

Volcanoes, impact craters, tectonic faults, river channels and a lava sea: a vast amount of information is captured in a relatively small area in this geologically rich new image from ESA’s Mars Express. View the full article

Image: On the pull View the full article

For the second time in its mission so far, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has flown through the tail of a comet. Predicted in advance by astronomers at University College London, UK, the spacecraft collected a wealth of science data that now awaits full analysis. View the full article

Today, at 20:00 CEST, the James Webb Space Telescope fired its onboard thrusters for nearly five minutes (297 seconds) to complete the final post launch course correction to Webb’s trajectory. This mid-course correction burn inserted Webb toward its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, nearly 1.5 million kilometres away from the Earth. View the full article

When Joe Biden was inaugurated as President one year ago, he fulfilled his promise to rejoin the Paris Agreement and set a course for the US to tackle the climate crisis by supporting global efforts to limit global warming. ESA recently joined the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by public video link to share European plans and expertise on measuring carbon dioxide and methane from space. View the full article

Video: 00:03:10 Timelapse of the James Webb Space Telescope from preparation to liftoff on Ariane 5 at Europe’s Spaceport on 25 December 2021. View the full article