European Space Agency

July 23, 2020 – If Rosalind Franklin had had a birthday wish, she probably never would have dreamed of having her name roving on Mars. As the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of the prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA tomorrow, the ExoMars rover named after her prepares to leave her symbolic footprint […]

May 25, 2020 – Launched in 2013, ESA’s Gaia satellite has been scanning the sky to measure the positions, distances and motions of more than one billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The goal of the mission is to create the most detailed galactic map ever made, in order to investigate the Milky […]

May 20, 2020 – In an area stretching from Africa to South America, Earth’s magnetic field is gradually weakening. This strange behaviour has geophysicists puzzled and is causing technical disturbances in satellites orbiting Earth. Scientists are using data from ESA’s Swarm constellation to improve our understanding of this area known as the ‘South Atlantic Anomaly.’ […]

May 18, 2020 – The 16th crew at Concordia research Station in Antarctica to spend a full winter at the facility, wave goodbye to the Sun as it descends below the horizon, not to return for four months. Sunday 3 May marked the start of the crew’s winter-over period. The 12-member group will spend the next […]

May 12, 2020 – Jupiter’s moon Europa is a fascinating world. On its surface, the moon appears to be scratched and scored with reddish-brown scars, which rake across the surface in a crisscrossing pattern. These ‘scars’ are etched into a layer of water ice, which is thought to be at least several kilometres thick and covering […]

April 30, 2020 – The notion that rain could lead to a volcanic eruption may seem strange, but scientists from the University of Miami in the USA, have used information from satellites, including the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, to discover that a period of heavy rainfall may have triggered the four month-long eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea […]

April 17, 2020 – Almost 50 years after the Apollo missions returned lunar material to Earth, ESA experts are helping to uncover the secrets of two previously unopened samples to learn more about ancient processes on the Moon – and to refine and practice techniques for future sample return missions. With one sample already being […]

Scientists using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite have noticed a strong reduction of ozone concentrations over the Arctic. Unusual atmospheric conditions, including freezing temperatures in the stratosphere, have led ozone levels to plummet – causing a ‘mini-hole’ in the ozone layer. The ozone layer is a natural, protective layer of gas in the stratosphere […]

March 27, 2020 – New data, based on observations from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, are showing strong reductions in nitrogen dioxide concentrations over several major cities across Europe – including Paris, Madrid and Rome. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly across the world – affecting 170 countries with more than 530 000 confirmed […]

March 27, 2020 – The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission takes us over part of the Mekong Delta – a major rice-producing region in southwest Vietnam. In Vietnam, rice has been a strategic crop for national food security. Vietnam is the fifth largest producer of rice in the world, the majority of which is grown in the Mekong Delta […]

March 13, 2020 – Scientists have detected ammonium salts on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (shown in this image on the right) by analysing data collected by the Visible, Infrared and Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on ESA’s Rosetta mission between August 2014 and May 2015. The new study, led by Olivier Poch of Institut de Planétologie et […]

March 11, 2020 – According to a new report, Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s – currently on track with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case climate warming scenario. The findings, published in two separate papers in Nature, show that Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tonnes of […]

February 10, 2020 – This Wednesday 12 February,  ESA’s latest mission will enter the vacuum of space, not aboard a rocket but by being released from the International Space Station. The first task of the shoebox-sized Qarman CubeSat is simply to fall. While typical space missions resist orbital decay, Qarman will drift down month by […]

January 24, 2020 – This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image features an area in the Santa Cruz Department of Bolivia, where part of the tropical dry forest has been cleared for agricultural use. Since the 1980s, the area has been rapidly deforested owing to a large agricultural development effort where people from the Andean high plains (the […]

January 23, 2020 – As well as providing global navigation services, Europe’s Galileo satellite constellation is acontributing to saving more than 2000 lives annually by relaying SOS messages to first responders. And from now on the satellites will reply to these messages, assuring people in danger that help is on the way. This ESA-design ‘return […]

January 21, 2020 – Material falling into a black hole casts X-rays out into space – and now, for the first time, ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has used the reverberating echoes of this radiation to map the dynamic behaviour and surroundings of a black hole itself. Most black holes are too small on the sky […]