Category: ESA

In 2023 satnav receivers are everywhere: in our phones, our cars, and drones, in fixed infrastructure, aboard boats, trains and aircraft. They are also in space: more than 95% of all the satellites in low-Earth orbit carry satnav receivers to calculate their position. The additional signals from Europe’s Galileo satellites are providing a big boost Read More

In brief The Stuttgart Operated University Research CubeSat for Evaluation and Education, or SOURCE for short, is a mini-satellite designed and built by students taking part in the third cycle of Fly Your Satellite! Its ambitious mission will see it operate around 500km above Earth’s surface to test several technologies, as well as conducting atmospheric Read More

Thousands of years from now, the descendants of humankind gather via a galactic network of wormholes to begin the joint exploration of a curiously Mars-like world in deep space. A constellation of quantum communication satellites serve to oversee the progressive mapping of this terra incognita by AI rovers, which are capable of morphing their shape Read More

The interactive version of the Space Ambition book is now online, featuring all the content and images included in the hardcover edition. With an introduction from ESA DG Josef Aschbacher, an overview of ESA’s ambition for space in Europe, and more than 120 pages of inspiring space images, this interactive publication brings ESA’s vision and Read More

Today Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, delivering metre-level accuracy, and if you are a modern smartphone owner then you – like nearly four billion others around the world – are among its users. This week we are celebrating that almost exactly a decade ago, on 12 March 2013, Europe for the Read More

A partnership between ESA and PLAYMOBIL continues to inspire and educate children about space. It also helps to support the children’s humanitarian organisation UNICEF and its work with vulnerable children around the world. During his Beyond mission, ESA's Luca Parmitano used his PLAYMOBIL figure in educational activities for children. Launched in 1974, PLAYMOBIL figures are Read More

Carole Mundell is the new Director of Science, succeeding the current director Günther Hasinger. Professor Mundell is an internationally renowned scientist with extensive experience in inclusive leadership, operational management, strategy and international science policy development. She joined ESA from the University of Bath where she held the Hiroko Sherwin Chair in Extragalactic Astronomy, was founding Read More

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of rapid changes to the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 545-kilogram spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The primary objective of the NASA mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it Read More

Internal research fellow Johanna Wessing performing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy of the topmost skin of a candidate material for space. This powerful technique enables the analysis of surface structures and composition to a depth of just a few  nanometres – a nanometre being a billionth of a metre, or, typically, a few dozen individual atoms. Exposure Read More

This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the massive galaxy cluster RX J2129. Due to Gravitational lensing, this observation contains three different images of the same supernova-hosting galaxy, which you can see in closer detail here. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend Read More