European Space Agency

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia. View the full article

ESA has signed a contract with OHB Italia SpA worth €63 million to begin preparatory work on the Agency’s proposed Ramses mission to the infamous asteroid Apophis. View the full article

Video: 00:03:27 On Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 October 2024, the European Space Agency opened the doors to the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, in the Netherlands, welcoming some 9000 visitors to its 13th annual Open Day. As in previous years, ESA’s largest establishment in Europe invited the public to meet space engineers, astronauts and to see actual space hardware. Attendees explored state-of-the-art facilities, interacted with ESA and NASA astronauts and discovered various job opportunities at ESA. There was also a full schedule of talks from Space Rocks, celebrating the art and culture of science and space. View the full article

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Image: VAST focus of future space frequencies View the full article

The Copernicus Sentinel Expansion Missions are a major leap forward in Europe’s Earth observation capabilities. With the United Kingdom’s re-entry to the EU’s Copernicus programme, funding has been confirmed to complete the development of all six Copernicus Sentinel Expansion Missions, as discussed this week during the International Astronautical Congress taking place in Milan, Italy. View the full article

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At the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Milan this week, ESA signed a contract for Element #1, the first phase of the HydRON Demonstration System. HydRON, which stands for High thRoughput Optical Network, is set to transform the way data-collecting satellites communicate, using laser technology that will allow satellites to connect with each other and ground networks much faster. View the full article

With the initial images from each of the instruments aboard ESA’s EarthCARE satellite now in hand, it's time to reveal how these four advanced sensors work in synergy to measure exactly how clouds and aerosols influence the heating and cooling of our atmosphere. View the full article

On 15 October 2024, ESA’s Euclid space mission reveals the first piece of its great map of the Universe, showing millions of stars and galaxies. View the full article

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This week, at the International Aeronautics Congress in Milan, ESA officially kicked off a new project called Ciseres, a small satellite mission designed to significantly improve crisis response times using artificial intelligence (AI). Part of ESA's Civil Security from Space (CSS) programme, Ciseres aims to enhance satellite capabilities to alert first responders and government officials within minutes of the occurrence of a disaster – such as floods, fires, landslides. The project is led and co-financed by Deimos, a European space tech company specialising in small satellite missions. View the full article

ESA has awarded a contract valued at over €280 million to OHB in Germany to build ESA’s two Harmony Earth Explorer satellites. This innovative research mission will provide valuable new data on various Earth processes, from shifts in the shape of the land surface caused by earthquakes and volcanic activity to insights into glacier movement. Additionally, it will enhance our understanding of the interactions between the upper ocean and lower atmosphere, all of which will contribute to a deeper comprehension of Earth's dynamic systems. View the full article

Imagine a near future where services such as satellite navigation, video conferencing, and file sharing are as seamless on the Moon as they are on Earth. View the full article

Video: 00:00:23 From 7 until 13 October 2024, ESA/NASA’s SOHO spacecraft recorded Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), the second brightest comet it has ever seen. Meanwhile, large amounts of material were being spewed out by the Sun (covered in the centre), and planet Mercury is visible to the left. The comet’s nucleus is clearly visible, surrounded by a dusty coma and trailing an impressively long tail. SOHO sees the large dust tail edge-on, curving in on itself as it is pushed outward by solar wind. At the end of the video you can also see a rare phenomenon known as an ‘anti-tail’: a long, thin line that points towards the Sun. This tail is an optical illusion coming from SOHO getting an edge-on view of the larger cometary dust particles that accumulate in the comet’s orbital plane. Comet C/2023 A3 was seen for the first time early last year. It most likely came from the distant Oort cloud, and the last time this comet flew through the inner Solar System (if ever) was at least 80 000 years ago. The comet reached an estimated peak brightness just beyond –4 magnitude. (The more negative the visual magnitude value, the brighter the object.) Of the more than 5000 comets SOHO has seen flying past the Sun, only Comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) was brighter, with a visual magnitude of –5.5. SOHO’s location between the Sun and Earth gave it a front-row seat, but the same comet has been visible from Earth every evening since 12 October 2024. Throughout October, as the comet moves farther away from the Sun, it will gradually grow fainter and rise higher up in the western sky. The week that SOHO watched Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS was also a wild one in terms of space weather. The Sun unleashed no less than 4 X-class flares (the highest intensity type of flare), 28 medium-intensity M-class flares, and 31 coronal mass ejections – the latter being visible as white clouds of material in the video. All this activity led to two geomagnetic storms on Earth, resulting in beautiful auroras lighting up the night sky. SOHO, short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is a joint ESA-NASA mission to study the Sun. For almost 29 years now, it has been watching the Sun itself as well as the much fainter light coming from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the solar corona. The data shown in this video were taken by the LASCO C3 coronagraph instrument. Special thanks to Simeon Schmauß, who processed the raw data to create this impressive video. For comparison, here is a video of the comet with more standard data processing – the comet is so bright that it partially saturated SOHO’s sensor. What types of comets are there? How are comets named? View the full article

Image: Zero Debris Charter goes intercontinental View the full article

In an era where natural disasters and emergencies are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, ESA is taking a significant step forward in enhancing Europe's crisis management capabilities. View the full article

ESA has taken another important step on the road towards sustainability in space with its first in-orbit servicing mission RISE. A €119 million contract was signed with D-Orbit as the co-funding prime contractor. View the full article

ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence has taken its first images using three of the instruments that will be used to explore and study the asteroids Dimorphos and Didymos. View the full article

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Week in images: 07-11 October 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Resembling a Martian-like surface, this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image shows part of the Hardap region in south-central Namibia on the western edge of the Kalahari Desert. View the full article

The day began with an 85% chance that bad weather would cause a launch delay: it ended with ESA’s Hera mission successfully in space and en route to the Didymos binary asteroid system. At 16:52 CEST (14:52 UTC) on 7 October 2024, Hera took to the skies aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA. After a smooth 76-minute ascent, the spacecraft separated from its launcher, and, a few minutes later, ESA’s ESOC mission operations centre in Germany assumed control of the spacecraft. Here is what has happened since then. View the full article

ESA engineers have focused microscopes, hardness testers and an X-ray computer aided tomography machine onto a special aluminium weld just a single centimetre across – the historic result of the very first autonomous welding to be performed in space, and the first ESA has been involved with. View the full article

Video: 00:01:20 Approximately 41 000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field briefly reversed during what is known as the Laschamp event. During this time, Earth’s magnetic field weakened significantly—dropping to a minimum of 5% of its current strength—which allowed more cosmic rays to reach Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Centre for Geosciences used data from ESA’s Swarm mission, along with other sources, to create a sounded visualisation of the Laschamp event. They mapped the movement of Earth’s magnetic field lines during the event and created a stereo sound version which is what you can hear in the video. The soundscape was made using recordings of natural noises like wood creaking and rocks falling, blending them into familiar and strange, almost alien-like, sounds. The process of transforming the sounds with data is similar to composing music from a score. Data from ESA’s Swarm constellation are being used to better understand how Earth’s magnetic field is generated. The satellites measure magnetic signals not only from the core, but also from the mantle, crust, oceans and up to the ionosphere and magnetosphere. These data are crucial for studying phenomena such as geomagnetic reversals and Earth’s internal dynamics. The sound of Earth’s magnetic field, the first version of the magnetic field sonification produced with Swarm data, was originally played through a 32-speaker system set up in a public square in Copenhagen, with each speaker representing changes in the magnetic field at different places around the world over the past 100 000 years. View the full article