European Space Agency

Unveiling the all-new ESA Impact: Dive into our Q1 2024 edition Welcome to the 2024 first quarter edition of ESA Impact – your interactive gateway to the most important stories and images from the European Space Agency View the full article

The Sun erupted over the weekend, flinging electromagnetic radiation towards Earth, even illuminating skies with spectacular aurora borealis. For the first time, ESA’s unlikely space weather duo of SMOS and Swarm tracked the severe solar storm — which warped Earth’s magnetic field. View the full article

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A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyses them for hints of life. ESA has started to turn this scene into a reality, devising a mission to investigate an ocean world around either Jupiter or Saturn. But which moon should we choose? What should the mission do exactly? A team of expert scientists has delivered their findings. View the full article

A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyses them for hints of life. ESA has started to turn this scene into a reality, devising a mission to investigate an ocean world around either Jupiter or Saturn. But which moon should we choose? What should the mission do exactly? A team of expert scientists has delivered their findings. View the full article

Imagine being able to ask a chatbot, “Can you make me an extremely accurate classification map of crop cultivation in Kenya?” or “Are buildings subsiding in my street?” And imagine that the information that comes back is scientifically sound and based on verified Earth observation data. ESA, in conjunction with technology partners, is working to make such a tool a reality by developing AI applications that will revolutionise information retrieval in Earth observation. View the full article

Image: ESA astronaut candidate Rosemary Coogan lighting a fire during winter survival training in the snowy mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees as part of her basic astronaut training. View the full article

Image: The striking contrast of the diverse landscape in southeast Kenya is featured in this false-colour image captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2. View the full article

Video: 00:17:57 Air pollution is the largest environmental health risk in Europe and significantly impacts the health of the European population, particularly in urban areas. Following on from the Sentinel-5P satellite – the first Copernicus mission dedicated to monitoring our atmosphere – the Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 missions will take current air quality measuring capabilities to the next level. Together, the Sentinel-4 and -5 missions will provide information on atmospheric variables in support of European policies. This will include the monitoring of air quality, stratospheric ozone and solar radiation, and climate monitoring. This video features interviews with Giorgio Bagnasco, Sentinel-4 Mission Project Manager, Ben Veilhelmann, Sentinel-4&5 Mission Scientist and Didier Martin, Sentinel-5 Mission Project Manager. Access all "Unpacking Sentinels" videos. View the full article

ESA’s Gaia space telescope has further disentangled the history of our galaxy, discovering two surprising streams of stars that formed and wove together over 12 billion years ago. View the full article

A few layers of water ice – the width of a strand of DNA – are starting to impact Euclid’s vision; a common issue for spacecraft in the freezing cold of space, but a potential problem for this highly sensitive mission that requires remarkable precision to investigate the nature of the dark Universe. After months of research, Euclid teams across Europe are now testing a newly designed procedure to de-ice the mission's optics. If successful, the operations will validate the mission teams’ plan to keep Euclid’s optical system as ice-free as possible for the rest of its life in orbit. View the full article

ESA has signed contracts with several European companies for an overall amount of € 233 million to develop Genesis and a LEO-PNT demonstrator, two new missions within the FutureNAV programme that will keep Europe at the forefront of satellite navigation worldwide. View the full article

Image: Astronomers have created the largest yet cosmic 3D map of quasars: bright and active centres of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. This map shows the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, with the furthest shining bright when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old. The new map has been made with data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. While Gaia’s main objective is to map the stars in our own galaxy, in the process of scanning the sky it also spots objects outside the Milky Way, such as quasars and other galaxies. The graphic representation of the map (bottom right on the infographic) shows us the location of quasars from our vantage point, the centre of the sphere. The regions empty of quasars are where the disc of our galaxy blocks our view. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies and can be hundreds of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As the black hole’s gravitational pull spins up nearby gas, the process generates an extremely bright disk, and sometimes jets of light, that telescopes can observe. The galaxies that quasars live in sit inside massive clouds of invisible dark matter. The distribution of dark matter gives insight into how much dark matter there is in the Universe, and how strong it clusters. Astronomers compare these measurements across cosmic time to test our current model of the Universe's composition and evolution. Because quasars are so bright, astronomers use them to map out the dark matter in the very distant Universe, and fill in the timeline of how the cosmos evolved. For example, scientists have already compared the new quasar map with the cosmic microwave background, a snapshot of the oldest light in our cosmos. As this light travels to us, it is bent by the intervening web of dark matter – the same web mapped out by the quasars – and by comparing the two, scientists can measure how strongly matter clumps together through time. This map was made by Kate Storey-Fisher of the Donostia International Physics Center in Spain and the New York University, USA, and colleagues, and published in the Astrophysical Journal. It uses data from Gaia’s third data release, which contained 6.6 million quasar candidates, as well as data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Combining the datasets helped clean Gaia’s original dataset of contaminants such as stars and galaxies, and better pinpoint the distances to the quasars. The team also created a map of where dust, stars and other phenomena are expected to block our view of some quasars, which is critical for interpreting the quasar map. View the full article

Week in images: 11-15 March 2024 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Laser light sabre View the full article

Image: The historic centre of Vienna, Austria’s capital city, is featured in this image captured on 23 June 2023. View the full article

Video: 00:14:13 Climate change exacerbates droughts by making them more frequent, longer, and more severe. This can have a wide range of impacts on the environment, agriculture, ecosystems and communities including water scarcity, crop failure and food shortages. The upcoming Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring, LSTM, mission will improve sustainable agricultural productivity in a world of increasing water scarcity and variability. The mission will carry a high spatial-temporal resolution thermal infrared sensor to provide observations of land-surface temperature. These data are key to understand and respond to climate variability, manage water resources for agricultural production, predict droughts and also to address land degradation. LSTM is one of six Copernicus Sentinel Expansion missions that ESA is developing on behalf of the EU. The missions will expand the current capabilities of the Copernicus Space Component – the world’s biggest supplier of Earth observation data. This video features interviews with Ana Bolea Alamanac, LSTM Mission Project Manager, Ilias Manolis, LSTM Mission Payload Manager and Itziar Barat, LSTM Mission System and Operations Manager. Access all "Unpacking Sentinels" videos. View the full article

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The shoebox-sized Milani CubeSat, which will perform close-up mineral prospecting of the Dimorphos asteroid, is ready for delivery to ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence. The spacecraft will carry Milani and a second CubeSat, the Juventas radar imaging spacecraft for probing into the target asteroid, which together will be ESA’s first CubeSats to operate in deep space. View the full article

ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite has passed its environmental test campaign with flying colours – meaning that the satellite has been declared fit for liftoff and its life in the harsh environment of space. This new satellite, which is slated for launch in June, has been designed to show how it can improve weather forecasts in the Arctic – a region that currently lacks data for accurate short-term forecasts. View the full article

The European mission control centre near Munich, Germany, is set to undergo a transformation into a Moon mission control centre, tasked with supporting operations for missions to a lunar space station, the lunar surface and beyond. View the full article

Video: 00:03:01 After more than 6 months on the International Space Station, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen returned to Earth, marking the end of his Huginn mission. It was his second mission to the Space Station and his first long-duration, where he was the pilot of Crew-7, which consisted of Jasmin Moghbeli (NASA), Satoshi Furukawa (JAXA), and Konstantin Borisov (Roscosmos). View the full article

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Image: NGC 5468 – Cepheid host galaxy View the full article

In just a few months, ESA’s EarthCARE satellite will be lofted into orbit to fill in a piece of the complex climate puzzle – that piece being how clouds and aerosols, small particles such as dust suspended in the air, affect Earth’s energy balance. With the climate crisis upon us, this information is needed more urgently than ever – so much so, that the science of clouds and aerosols has been prioritised by the European Commission and ESA as part of their new Earth System Science Initiative. View the full article