European Space Agency

Image: ESA’s Test Centre expands View the full article

Since it was launched more than 12 years ago, ESA’s CryoSat ice mission has dazzled by way of its sheer technological and scientific excellence. This superb Earth Explorer satellite has returned a wealth of information that has transformed our understanding of Earth’s ice and how it is responding to climate change. In some circumstances, however, being dazzled isn’t a good thing, particularly when it comes to measuring the height of sea ice from space during the summer. A paper published in Nature describes how scientists have now found an ingenious way of removing the pesky problem of dazzle from surface meltwater to yield the first ever continuous, year-round, altimetry measurements of sea-ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean. View the full article

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will soon fulfil the role of commander of the International Space Station, taking over from fellow Expedition 67 crew member Oleg Artemyev. View the full article

The first satellite to be built under ESA’s Eurostar Neo programme stands ready to be shipped to its launch site. View the full article

Join us at the ESA stand at the 73rd International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2022), taking place from 18 to 22 September at the Paris Convention Centre in Paris. A week of lively interactions awaits the world space community, this year under the theme 'Space for @ll'. The congress will open its doors to the general public on 21 September. View the full article

Image: ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson are getting world-class geology training this week during the fifth edition of ESA’s Pangaea course. A balanced mix of theory and field trips, the course will take the pair all over Europe to hone their geology skills. The training began last week in the Italian Dolomites with lessons on fundamental geology knowledge and skills, martian geology and asteroids at Bletterbach Canyon. The rock samples from the canyon Alexander is holding in this image are a combination of gypsum (white hue) in siltstone-sandstone (reddish hue), and are analogous to rocks found on Mars. This week, Alexander and Stephanie will follow the footsteps of Apollo astronauts to study the Ries crater in Germany, one of the best-preserved impact craters on Earth, where American crews trained before their flights to the Moon. The course concludes the year with a trip to the volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote, Spain in November, to learn about the geological interactions between volcanic activity and water – two key factors in the search for life. The final part of the course has the astronauts travel to Lofoten, Norway, to focus on rocks similar to the lunar highlands. These will be important locations to explore during the future Artemis missions, as they may hold key information for unravelling the history of the Moon and our Solar System. The different field locations visited during Pangaea are used to train Alexander and Stephanie on how to read a landscape, collect scientifically relevant samples and effectively communicate their geological observations with teams back on Earth. Alexander is a geophysicist, volcanologist and more recently International Space Station commander in 2018, and has seen 5700 sunrises and sunsets in space. Pangaea is challenging this seasoned space explorer to become a field scientist in preparation for future deep space missions, where the astronauts will be the eyes and ears of the scientific community on Earth. Follow Alexander on Twitter for his takes on getting back in the classroom for Pangaea. View the full article

Video: 00:00:58 ESA’s Solar Orbiter has solved the mystery of a magnetic phenomenon in the solar wind. It has taken the first ever image of a ‘switchback’ in the solar corona, confirming its predicted ‘S’ shape. A switchback is defined by rapid flips in magnetic field direction. The observed switchback is linked to an active region associated with sunspots and magnetic activity where there is an interaction between open and closed magnetic field lines. The interaction releases energy and sends the S-shaped disturbance into space. The new data suggest that switchbacks could originate near the solar surface, and may be important in understanding the acceleration and heating of the solar wind. Solar Orbiter is a mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. Read more Credits: ESA; see onscreen for individual image credits. View the full article

With data from its closest pass of the Sun yet, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has found compelling clues as to the origin of magnetic switchbacks, and points towards how their physical formation mechanism might help accelerate the solar wind. View the full article

Video: 00:03:57 It has been an exciting and busy summer for the European Space Agency, with development and testing of its new Ariane 6 launcher. At Europe’s spaceport in, French Guiana, a test model of the launcher’s central core was assembled for the first time. Ariane 6 is the first Ariane rocket to be assembled horizontally, which is simpler and less costly than more traditional vertical assembly. Then, the rocket was moved to its launchpad and placed upright in the massive mobile gantry for combined tests, to validate the compatibility between all components of the complete launch system. Soon more testing will be done on Ariane 6’s upper stage at a purpose-built DLR facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany. View the full article

Week in images: 05-09 September 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

This is ESA is an illustrated guide to what ESA is and what we do. It has been available in print since 2019. Now this brochure is also available as an interactive publication in all ESA Member State languages. View the full article

Before Europe’s first Meteosat Third Generation Imager leaves the south of France at the end of the month aboard a ship bound for French Guiana, this remarkable new weather satellite has been taking centre stage at Thales Alenia Space’s facilities in Cannes. View the full article

Registration is now open for the 11th annual ESA Open Day at ESTEC, open to all visitors. ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, will be open from 10:00 to 17:00 on Sunday 2 October, giving visitors a chance to meet astronauts, space scientists and engineers and learn all about the work carried out at Europe’s largest space establishment. View the full article

Image: Astronomers have been bemused to find young stars spiralling into the centre of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer arm of the spiral in this huge, oddly shaped stellar nursery – called NGC 346 – may be feeding star formation in a river-like motion of gas and stars. This is an efficient way to fuel star birth, researchers say. The Small Magellanic Cloud has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way, making it similar to the galaxies found in the younger Universe, when heavier elements were more scarce. Because of this, the stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud burn hotter and so run out of their fuel faster than in our Milky Way. Though a proxy for the early universe, at 200 000 light-years away the Small Magellanic Cloud is also one of our closest galactic neighbours. Learning how stars form in the Small Magellanic Cloud offers a new twist on how a firestorm of star birth may have occurred early in the history of the Universe, when it was undergoing a 'baby boom' about two to three billion years after the Big Bang (the Universe is now 13.8 billion years old). The new results show that the process of star formation there is similar to that in our own Milky Way. Only 150 light-years in diameter, NGC 346 boasts the mass of 50 000 Suns. Its intriguing shape and rapid star formation rate have puzzled astronomers. It took the combined power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to unravel the behaviour of this mysterious-looking stellar nesting ground. “Stars are the machines that sculpt the Universe. We would not have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” explained study leader Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “We have several models that make predictions, and some of these predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what is regulating the process of star formation, because these are the laws that we need to also understand what we see in the early Universe.” Researchers determined the motion of the stars in NGC 346 in two different ways. Using Hubble, Sabbi and her team measured the changes in the stars’ positions over 11 years. The stars in this region are moving at an average velocity of 3200 kilometres per hour, which means that in 11 years they move 320 billion kilometres. This is about twice the distance between Earth and the Sun. But this cluster is relatively far away, inside a neighbouring galaxy. This means the observed motion is very small and therefore difficult to measure. These extraordinarily precise observations were possible only because of Hubble’s exquisite resolution and high sensitivity. Also, Hubble’s three-decade-long history of observations provides a baseline for astronomers to follow minute celestial motions over time. The second team, led by Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency, used the ground-based VLT’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument to measure radial velocity, which determines whether an object is approaching or receding from an observer. “What was really amazing is that we used two completely different methods with different facilities and basically we came to the same conclusion independently,” said Zeidler. “With Hubble, you can see the stars, but with MUSE we can also see the gas motion in the third dimension, and it confirms the theory that everything is spiralling inwards.” But why a spiral? “A spiral is really the good, natural way to feed star formation from the outside towards the centre of the cluster,” explained Zeidler. “It’s the most efficient way that stars and gas fuelling more star formation can move towards the centre.” Half of the Hubble data for this study of NGC 346 is archival. The first observations were taken 11 years ago. They were recently repeated to trace the motion of the stars over time. Given the telescope’s longevity, the Hubble data archive now contains more than 32 years of astronomical data, powering unprecedented, long-term studies. “The Hubble archive is really a gold mine,” said Sabbi. “There are so many interesting star-forming regions that Hubble has observed over the years. Given that Hubble is performing so well, we can actually repeat these observations. This can really advance our understanding of star formation.” Observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope should be able to resolve lower-mass stars in the cluster, giving a more holistic view of the region. Over Webb’s lifespan, astronomers will be able to repeat this experiment and measure the motion of the low-mass stars. They will then be able to compare the high-mass stars and the low-mass stars to finally learn the full extent of the dynamics of this nursery. View the full article

Staying in touch with each another always, no matter whereabouts on Earth, is crucial for everything from driverless cars to remote healthcare, electronically enabled commerce, tele-education and remote working. View the full article

The fourth Spacebus Neo satellite to benefit from ESA’s Neosat programme has launched into space on board the second Ariane 5 launch mission of 2022. View the full article

Thousands of never-before-seen young stars are spotted in a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula for the appearance of its dusty filaments in previous telescope images, the nebula has long been a favourite for astronomers studying star formation. In addition to young stars, Webb reveals distant background galaxies, as well as the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust. View the full article

Video: 00:01:00 This video takes the viewer on a journey that zooms through space to reveal the Tarantula Nebula. Thousands of never-before-seen young stars are spotted in the stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. It is nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula for the appearance of its dusty filaments in previous telescope images, the nebula has long been a favourite for astronomers studying star formation. In addition to young stars, Webb reveals distant background galaxies, as well as the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust. Read more. Download the Hi-Res version of the video. View the full article

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Astronauts with their sights on the Moon are receiving world-class geology training during the fifth edition of ESA’s Pangaea campaign. From choosing landing sites for a future Artemis mission, to designing science operations for the lunar surface, the course challenges space explorers to become field scientists. View the full article

Week in images: 29 August - 02 September 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

More than 265 000 visitors headed to Cologne in Germany for Gamescom last week – the world’s largest computer and video games fair. As well as the latest games releases, they got a chance to discover that ESA and the gaming world have a lot in common. View the full article

Image: Webb takes its first exoplanet image View the full article

Europe’s latest Galileo satellites in space have joined the operational constellation, transmitting navigation signals to three billion users across planet Earth as well as relaying distress calls to rescuers. Their entry into service follows a summer test campaign and will result in a measurable increase in positioning accuracy and improved data delivery performance of the overall Galileo system. View the full article

Image: One small step for a robot View the full article