European Space Agency

Today in Brussels, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission consolidated their cooperation on the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI), marking the successful conclusion of negotiations and clearing the way for development to begin. EuroQCI is an advanced network that aims to protect everything from personal data to Europe's critical infrastructure, using proven principles of quantum physics. View the full article

The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed a contract with Thales Alenia Space in Italy to lead European aerospace companies in building the Argonaut Lunar Descent Element, ESA’s first lunar lander. View the full article

The European Space Agency (ESA) Planetary Defence Office is closely monitoring the recently discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, which has a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2032. This page was last updated on 29 January 2025. View the full article

The second day of the European Space Conference saw European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano join ESA Directors and the Director General on a range of panels and interactions with media. View the full article

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Hisdesat, Spain's premier provider of secure satellite communications, is set to launch its SpainSat Next Generation I (SNG I) satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 29 January from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 20:34 EST (30 January at 02:34 CET). The European Space Agency (ESA)-supported satellite will provide more cost-effective, adaptable and secure communication services for governments and emergency response teams across Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and up to Singapore in Asia. View the full article

A groundbreaking study, funded by ESA, reveals that fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado are largely driven by the smouldering combustion of woody debris. This crucial discovery highlights the significant influence of fuel characteristics on fire emissions, with wide-ranging implications for global carbon cycles, air quality and biodiversity. View the full article

Week in images: 20-24 January 2025 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Satellite ready for close-up View the full article

Video: 00:01:20 Listen to the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft as it flew past Mercury on 8 January 2025. This sixth and final flyby used the little planet's gravity to steer the spacecraft on course for entering orbit around Mercury in 2026. What you can hear in the sonification soundtrack of this video are real spacecraft vibrations measured by the Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) instrument. The accelerometer data have been shifted in frequency to make them audible to human ears – one hour of measurements have been sped up to one minute of sound. BepiColombo is always shaking ever so slightly: fuel is slightly sloshing, the solar panels are vibrating at their natural frequency, heat pipes are pushing vapour through small tubes, and so forth. This creates the eerie underlying hum throughout the video. But as BepiColombo gets closer to Mercury, ISA detects other forces acting on the spacecraft. Most scientifically interesting are the audible shocks that sound like short, soft bongs. These are caused by the spacecraft responding to entering and exiting Mercury's shadow, where the Sun's intense radiation is suddenly blocked. One of ISA's scientific goals is to monitor the changes in the ‘solar radiation pressure’ – a force caused by sunlight striking BepiColombo as it orbits the Sun and, eventually, Mercury. The loudest noises – an ominous ‘rumbling’ – are caused by the spacecraft's large solar panels rotating. The first rotation occurs in shadow at 00:17 in the video, while the second adjustment at 00:51 was also captured by one of the spacecraft’s monitoring cameras. Faint sounds like wind being picked up in a phone call, which grow more audible around 30 seconds into the video, are caused by Mercury's gravitational field pulling the nearest and furthest parts of the spacecraft by different amounts. As the planet's gravity stretches the spacecraft ever so slightly, the spacecraft responds structurally. At the same time, the onboard reaction wheels change their speed to maintain the spacecraft's orientation, which you can hear as a frequency shift in the background. This is the last time that many of these effects can be measured with BepiColombo's largest solar panels, which make the spacecraft more susceptible to vibrations. The spacecraft module carrying these panels will not enter orbit around Mercury with the mission's two orbiter spacecraft. The video shows an accurate simulation of the spacecraft and its route past Mercury during the flyby, made with the SPICE-enhanced Cosmographia spacecraft visualisation tool. The inset that appears 38 seconds into the video shows real photographs taken by one of BepiColombo's monitoring cameras. Read more about BepiColombo's sixth Mercury flyby Access the related broadcast quality video material. View the full article

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured Cyclone Dikeledi south of Madagascar on 16 January, just a few days after it made landfall on Africa’s southeastern coast causing widespread destruction in several countries and islands. View the full article

Image: A Tarantula’s outskirts View the full article

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Estonian Space Office have set out to develop Europe's newest space cyber range that aims to make space technology more secure and accessible for companies across Europe. Last year, Estonian industry was invited to submit proposals for concepts, and today the contract has been signed with a consortium led by Spaceit to begin development. View the full article

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A study using data from ESA’s Swarm mission suggests that faint magnetic signatures created by Earth’s tides can help us determine magma distribution under the seabed and could even give us insights into long-term trends in global ocean temperatures and salinity. View the full article

A capacity increase by almost 80%! In late July 2024, the Malargüe deep-space communication station completed an important upgrade of its antenna feed that will allow missions to send much more data back to Earth. View the full article

Week in images: 13-17 January 2025 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Seed-sized space chip View the full article

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice. View the full article

The largest photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations, unveils hundreds of millions of stars. It took more than 10 years to collect data for this colorful portrait of our neighbouring galaxy and was created from more than 600 snapshots. This stunning, colourful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars, and is spread across roughly 2.5 billion pixels. View the full article

With ESA’s EarthCARE satellite and four measuring instruments all working extremely well and fully commissioned, the mission’s ‘first level’ data stream is now freely available. By combining data from all four instruments, scientists ultimately aim to address a critical Earth science question: how do clouds and aerosols affect the heating and cooling of our atmosphere? View the full article

There is an increasing willingness in the space sector to tackle the problem of space debris. Yet much of the required technology to mitigate or prevent its risks is still missing. Preventing new debris, avoiding collisions and the timely clearance of satellites from orbit at their end-of-mission are complex challenges that each require a variety of practical solutions. Released to the public on 15 January 2025, the Zero Debris Technical Booklet is a community-driven document that identifies technologies that will contribute to the goal of Zero Debris by 2030. Essentially, the Booklet forms a technical Zero Debris 'to-do list'. View the full article

Three InCubed satellites have launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, highlighting ESA’s role as partner to industry and its support for business and technology innovation. View the full article

Video: 00:02:05 This is a new artist’s animation of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even seemingly simple ideas about the nature of our galaxy’s central bar and the spiral arms have been overturned. Gaia has shown us that it has more than two spiral arms and that they are less prominent than we previously thought. In addition, Gaia has shown that its central bar is more inclined with respect to the Sun. No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so we can’t take a selfie, but Gaia is giving us the best insight yet of what our home galaxy looks like. Once all of Gaia’s observations collected over the past decade are made available in two upcoming data releases, we can expect an even sharper view of the Milky Way. Click here to download the still image of the Milky Way. View the full article

The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood. View the full article