European Space Agency

How can Europe exploit its technical, industrial and financial strengths to ensure it remains a leader in space transportation in the 2030s and beyond? How can ESA, Europe’s national space agencies and institutions, and both established and new industrial partners better co-ordinate their efforts to meet global competition that demands innovation and cost-reduction? These were just a few of the questions discussed during an ESA-hosted roundtable conference held on 27-28 June in Palermo, Sicily. The event, called “Shared Vision for the Future of Space Transportation in Europe”, saw more than 100 representatives of Europe’s space sector discuss the technical and political challenges shaping the space transportation market. View the full article

A 12-strong star-studded advisory group is to guide ESA’s human and robotic space exploration as the agency aims to increase European ambitions in space. View the full article

Vincent Müller, a recent school-leaver, will visit all of ESA’s European sites in the next two weeks. The lucky winner of a free Interrail ticket from the DiscoverEU programme, he decided to use the ticket to make this journey and will share his experiences in a blog to enthuse young people to pursue a career in space. View the full article

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will soon reveal unprecedented and detailed views of the Universe, with the upcoming release of its first full-colour images and spectroscopic data. View the full article

Week in images: 04-08 July 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Image: Discs for fault detection View the full article

ESA’s new medium-lift Vega-C rocket is nearly ready for its inaugural flight. You can follow live on ESA Web TV. Flight VV21 will lift off as soon as 13 July at 13:13 CEST, pending suitable conditions for launch. Broadcast begins 12:45 CEST/11:45 BST on ESA Web TV 13:13 CEST/12:13 BST – liftoff View the full article

Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, part of the Canary Islands lying in the North Atlantic Ocean, are featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. View the full article

Video: 00:43:03 Watch the replay of the Q&A session with the media to learn more about the preparations for the upcoming launch of Vega-C. The inaugural flight of this new rocket in the Vega family is currently planned on 13 July 2022. Speakers include Stefano Bianchi, ESA Head of Flight Programmes Department, Benoit Pouffary, ESA Vega & Space Rider Launch System Engineering Manager, Ettore Scardecchia, Avio Head of Engineering and Mario Cosmo, ASI Director of Science and Research. View the full article

Video: 00:01:50 FedCon is one of Europe's largest science fiction conventions, its 2022 edition held earlier this month in Bonn in Germany. Actors from the many incarnations of Star Trek, as well as Star Wars, Doctor Who, and other science fiction shows met with thousands of fans. ESA has been taking part in FedCon since 2015, with talks, panels, and a stand covering our space science, earth observation, and human exploration missions. At this year's event, scientists and engineers from ESTEC, ESOC, and the EAC gave talks about JWST, Rosetta, mission operations, and careers with ESA. In addition, to help celebrate FedCon's 30th anniversary, ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti sent a special message from her current Minerva mission on the ISS. She was dressed in an outfit worn by flight crew in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series (2004–2009) and wearing the dog tags of famed Viper pilot, Kara "Starbuck" Thrace. Samantha previously appeared as a speaker at FedCon in 2018 and also took part in a 2020 episode of the Space Rocks Uplink vodcast with Katee Sackhoff, who played Starbuck in the series. While we may not yet have invented a faster-than-light drive as used in Battlestar Galactica, ESA turns science fiction into science fact every day, exploring and studying the near-Earth environment, the Solar System, and the Universe beyond, to innovate, inform, and inspire. And we're always happy to share that excitement with our friends around the world, through events like FedCon and much more. View the full article

The ESA astronaut selection has been progressing as planned, with phase two of the selection process ending in March this year, and phase three ending in June. View the full article

With air temperatures in excess of 10°C above the average for the time of year in parts of Europe, the United States and Asia, June 2022 has gone down as a record breaker. The fear is that these extreme early-season heatwaves are a taste of what could soon be the norm as climate change continues to take hold. For those in cities, the heat dissipates slower creating ‘urban heat islands’, which make everyday life even more of a struggle. An instrument, carried on the International Space Station, has captured the recent land-surface temperature extremes for some European cities, including Milan, Paris and Prague. View the full article

In a complex role-played version of a mission to the Moon, controllers at ESOC combined with a team of geological scientists and ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter to oversee a rover’s collection of rock samples. Acting as if he were in lunar orbit, the astronaut was in fact based in a hotel room in Catania, Sicily, with the rover 23 km away and 2 600 m uphill on the volcanic flanks of Mount Etna. As Thomas commanded the rover to pick up rocks his hand experienced just what the robot’s gripper felt – an added dimension in remote control. View the full article

As excitement mounts for the unveiling of Webb’s first full-colour images on Tuesday 12 July, here’s how to participate in the global celebration via ESA’s channels. Choose from watching a livestream, attending an in-person event, or joining our social media activities. View the full article

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Image: Cosmic manatee accelerates particles from head View the full article

Week in images: 27 June - 1 July 2022 Discover our week through the lens View the full article

Video: 00:04:21 “After Euclid’s lifetime, it will just be floating in space. What if future beings found Euclid? How would they know anything about the humanity of the people?” – Tom Kitching, lead scientist of Euclid’s VIS instrument. The team behind ESA’s Euclid mission has come together to create something special – a personal and collective galaxy-shaped fingerprint painting that has been attached to the spacecraft ready to launch into space. The collaborative nature of the artwork reflects the collaborative nature of the Euclid project overall; in both cases, people have come together to build something unique. The Fingertip Galaxy was created by visual artist Lisa Pettibone and Euclid instrument scientist Tom Kitching. Since the very first fingerprint was pressed down in 2019, over 250 scientists and engineers have contributed to the piece of art. So why a galaxy? Euclid is a galaxy-imaging machine that will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years to make a 3D map of the Universe. The mission’s ultimate aim is to explore dark matter and dark energy. “Although Euclid has always been beautiful in concept and materials, it didn’t really say anything about the people involved and humanity as a whole. We asked ourselves whether we could do something artistic that would speak to people,” says Lisa. Scientists and engineers involved in Euclid were invited to dip their fingertips in paint and make their mark on a large piece of paper. “We wanted something authentic, not perfect, and not shaped too much,” continues Lisa. “The result is a piece of art with a wonderful energy to it that captures all the energy of the people involved.” The artwork was photographed and engraved onto a plaque using lasers at Mullard Space Science Laboratory – the same lasers that are used to etch parts for satellites. The plaque was fixed to Euclid and revealed at a ‘Goodbye Euclid’ event on 1 July 2022, when Euclid left Thales Alenia Space in Turin to head to Cannes for final testing as a complete system. Euclid’s project scientist René Laureijs suggested adding text to the plaque to explain the thoughts behind it. Continuing the artistic nature of the project, poet Simon Barraclough wrote a dedicated poem, from which a short extract was chosen to be etched on to the plaque in a typewriter font that swirls around the galaxy of fingerprints. This video ends with Simon reading part of Since his poem. Lisa summarises the Fingertip Galaxy: “It is adding an element of humanity to a dark, vast space, where as far as we can see there is no other intelligent life.” Credit: Filmmaker/composer: Sam Charlesworth Fingertip Galaxy creators: Tom Kitching and Lisa Pettibone Poet: Simon Barraclough – ‘Unextraordinary Light (For Euclid)’ Special thanks: ESA, Euclid mission team, Mullard Space Science Laboratory Additional media: NASA, @jeremyperkins from unsplash.com View the full article

The quarterly ESA Impact is out now! Welcome to the June quarterly edition of ESA Impact, an interactive showcase of the best images of the last quarter. View the full article

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured this impressive, wide-angled view of Patagonia at the southern end of South America, as well as the Falkland Islands. View the full article

Image: Patagonia View the full article

Image: Copernicus Sentinel-1 maps Bangladesh flood View the full article

Video: 00:29:18 Will we find 2021 QM1 before it finds us? View the full article

Image: Deep within the Sahara Desert lies one of the best-preserved craters on Earth. On Asteroid Day, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the almost-perfectly circular Tenoumer Crater in Mauritania. View the full article

European technology that allows satellite navigation signals to safely guide aircraft down for landing in the majority of Europe’s airports will now be put to use across Africa and the Indian Ocean. ASECNA, the Agency for Air Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar, and ESA today signed an agreement to deploy a Satellite-based Augmentation System (SBAS) across a service region of more than 16.5 million sq. km, one and a half times the size of Europe’s coverage area. View the full article