European Space Agency

Australia’s deadly bushfires in the 2019-2020 season generated 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – triggering vast algal blooms in the Southern Ocean. Using satellite data, two new studies published in Nature prove how satellites can illuminate the complicated ways in which Earth is responding to climate change in an era of worsening wildfires. View the full article

Image: ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer wearing the SpaceX spacesuit View the full article

ESA’s Euclid mission has reached a new milestone in its development with successful testing of the telescope and instruments showing that it can operate and achieve the required performance in the extreme environment of space. View the full article

The new launch complex built for Europe’s upcoming Ariane 6 rocket is inaugurated at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. View the full article

Video: 00:03:19 ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet takes you on a tour of the International Space Station like no other. Filmed with a 360 camera, the Space Station 360 series lets you explore for yourself alongside Thomas’s explanation – episode six is NASA’s Node-3, also known as Tranquility. Node 3 has cylindrical hull 4.5 m in diameter with a shallow conical section enclosing each end. It is almost 7 m long and, together with the Space Station’s observatory Cupola, weighed over 13.5 tonnes at launch. Built in Europe, Node 3 houses the life-support equipment, the toilet and equipment racks. Follow Thomas: https://blogs.esa.int/exploration/it/category/astronauts/thomas-pesquet/ The video is in French, to activate the English subtitles, click on the CC icon at the bottom right of the YouTube player. Access the other Space Station 360 videos View the full article

At ESA, we believe that we have a responsibility to use our space technologies, applications and services to benefit planet Earth and humankind. Some examples of how we do this are now on display in Paris and Brussels at a new exhibition called Space for our Planet: Space Solutions for a Sustainable World. View the full article

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury will make the first of six flybys of its destination planet on 1 October before entering orbit in 2025. View the full article

A new six-month round-trip commercial space transportation service from 2022, backed by ESA, will enable companies to manufacture in space very pure and more capable materials, discover new pharmaceutical drugs and bring them back for use on Earth. View the full article

Video: 00:01:09 What’s coming next in space? Find out at our virtual ESA Open Day on Sunday 3 October, from 1300 – 1600 CEST (1200 – 1500 BST). Your chance to talk to the people behind future space missions, get close-up views of space hardware and hear from astronaut Alexander Gerst. The Open Day is open to anyone; all you have to do is register to attend. Find out more here View the full article

With Covid restrictions a little more relaxed, scientists from Europe and the USA were finally able to team up for a long-awaited field experiment to ensure that a new Copernicus satellite called CHIME will deliver the best possible data products as soon as it is operational in orbit. This new mission is being developed to support EU policies on the management of natural resources, ultimately helping to address the global issue of food security. View the full article

Image: A female volunteer gets comfortable in her waterbed, as the dry immersion study to recreate some of the effects of spaceflight on the body kicks off this week in Toulouse, France. Called Vivaldi, or Validation of the Dry Immersion, the campaign features all female-participants in a European first. Immersion begins when water covers the subject above the thorax, immobilised with legs and trunk covered with a cotton sheet. Only the arms and head remain free outside the tarp. As a result, the body experiences ‘supportlessness’ – something close to what astronauts feel while floating on the International Space Station. In weightlessness, astronauts’ bodies lose muscle and bone density, vision changes and fluids shift to the brain. Finding ways to stay healthy in orbit is a large part of human spaceflight research. Volunteers spend almost 24 hours a day in the immersion tank, limiting their movements as much as possible. Each day starts at 7 am with urine and blood samples, followed by scientific protocols and measurements to study how the body adapts. All activities from leisure to hygiene are done within the constraints of immersion. Only a small pillow is allowed during meals to ease eating. Showering and transfer to other experiments are done outside of the tank while lying on their backs and with their head tilted 6 degrees down to minimise fluid shifts. The results from this type of research do not only benefit astronauts but have implications for patients on Earth with similar disorders and elderly people. This is the only the second time a dry immersion campaign takes place with all-female participants, and it is a first for Europe. ESA decided to launch the study to address the gender gap in science data. View the full article

Week in images: 20 - 24 September 2021 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Layered history View the full article

Calabria, often referred to as the ‘boot’ of Italy, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. View the full article

Video: 00:02:40 ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet takes you on a tour of the International Space Station like no other. Filmed with a 360 camera, the Space Station 360 series lets you explore for yourself alongside Thomas’s explanation – episode five is NASA’s Node-1, also known as Unity. Unity is the module that connects the Russian segment of the International Space Station to the other modules. Launched on 4 December 1998 inside Space Shuttle Endeavour, it was joined to the Russian Zarya module two days later, forming the basis of the International Space Station. The cylindrical module has six docking ports to connect visiting spacecraft and other modules. Follow Thomas: https://blogs.esa.int/exploration/it/category/astronauts/thomas-pesquet/ The video is in French, to activate the English subtitles, click on the CC icon at the bottom right of the YouTube player. Access the other Space Station 360 videos View the full article

This week 20 women are tucking themselves in a waterbed for five days as part of a dry immersion study to recreate some of the effects of spaceflight on the body. The campaign kicked off yesterday with the first two subjects at the Medes space clinic in Toulouse, France. View the full article

Image: Gloomy moonscape for rover test View the full article

For a team of scientists and technicians from Europe and the US, the fact of ‘going back to the office’ this September has meant heading off to the Cabo Verde islands in the Atlantic – not to extend their summer holidays, but for a complex international experiment campaign that will scrutinise the data being delivered by one of today’s most innovative Earth observation satellites: ESA’s Aeolus wind mission. View the full article

Week in images: 13 - 17 September 2021 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:04:32 Kick off the 2021-22 school year with ESA school projects. ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer introduces the wide range of space-based STEM projects available to primary and secondary students: Moon Camp, Climate Detectives, Astro Pi, CanSat and Mission X. Learn more View the full article

Maharloo Lake, a seasonal salt lake in Iran, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. View the full article

Video: 00:01:34 ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet takes you on a tour of the International Space Station like no other. Filmed with a 360 camera, the Space Station 360 series lets you explore for yourself alongside Thomas’s explanation – episode four is NASA’s Quest airlock. The Quest airlock is the Station’s smallest module, but it is vital for going on spacewalks. This is where the astronauts suit up into their spacesuits, prepare for the spacewalk and enter the airlock to go outside for maintenance, installing new equipment or science experiments. Follow Thomas: https://blogs.esa.int/exploration/it/category/astronauts/thomas-pesquet/ The video is in French, to activate the English subtitles, click on the CC icon at the bottom right of the YouTube player. Access the other Space Station 360 videos View the full article

Video: 00:03:01 Verifying that a satellite will resist the sheer noise of the rocket launching it into orbit is a very important test that every mission must successfully pass. “Typically satellites are tested inside purpose-built reverberant chambers, such as ESTEC’s own Large European Acoustic Facility sometimes described as the largest and most powerful sound system in Europe,” explains ESA test facility expert Steffen Scharfenberg, overseeing the test campaign together with ESA mechanical engineer Ivan Ngan. A very powerful noise generation system produces a uniform noise field thanks to the reverberation on the thick concrete walls of the chamber. ESA has initiated a working group comprising of European spacecraft testing entities, industries and academics to study an alternative method, in which the satellite is surrounded by less powerful noise generators but these are placed very close all around the satellite. This method is called the Direct Field Acoustic Noise Test. This technique is already in use in several locations but there is not yet much experience of it in Europe. Accordingly ESA has just completed a test campaign where the classic method and the new method have been used on a small satellite to compare their results. Evaluating this new kind of acoustic test for satellites at ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre in the Netherlands, shown via time-lapse. At first glance, the placing of 36 powerful loudspeakers and 18 subwoofers looks like preparations for a big rock concert – except these speakers are all being placed to face each other in a circle instead of outward. The microphones arranged around the satellite measure the surrounding acoustic field during the test run. The test took a day and a half to set up, then a day to dismantle, with the actual acoustic test run itself taking place in a matter of a few minutes for passing the qualification level requirement. The satellite under test is a ‘structural and themal model’ test version of the Proba-V Earth-observing mission, manufactured by QinetiQ Space in Belgium. The working group is now assessing the obtained test data in detail, to confirm suitability of the method and defines when and how this method could be employed. View the full article

World governments agreed in the late 1980s to protect Earth’s ozone layer by phasing out ozone-depleting substances emitted by human activities, under the Montreal Protocol. The phase out of these substances has not only helped protect the ozone layer for future generations but has also protected human health and ecosystems by limiting the harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching Earth. On 16 September, the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, we take a closer look at this year’s ozone hole. View the full article

ESA confirmed a contract signature yesterday with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) to be the main customer for their Lunar Pathfinder satellite launching in 2024 that will provide communications services around the Moon. View the full article