NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are teaming up to tackle climate change, inking a new strategic partnership that will see the collected observations of Earth from space released freely. The collaboration comes amid ominous predictions for how changing global temperatures and rising sea levels will expand flooding, accelerate fires, and see even greater extremes in weather conditions.
The Hubble Space Telescope is currently not working due to a hardware failure NASA has been unable to repair. Despite its nonfunctional nature at this time, NASA is still sharing some of the beautiful images the iconic telescope has taken. One image can be seen below in cropped form, with the full image further down in the story. The image shows a pair of enormous galaxies that immediately capture your attention.
The European Space Agency (ESA) recently celebrated 20 years of ESA astronauts living and working on the International Space Station. Since the ESA arrived on the ISS 20 years ago, it has been running an experiment in the weightless research center for that entire time. The experiment is called the Plasma Kristall (PK) suite, and it's investigating fundamental science.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that it has completed the first high-altitude drop test for the ExoMars parachute system. The successful test was completed after delays due to several weeks of bad weather and strong winds. ESA conducted a pair of drop tests in Kiruna, Sweden. The agency reports that the large 15 meter-wide first stage main parachute performed flawlessly at supersonic speeds.
There are numerous mysteries on Mars that scientists from around the world are working to solve. One of the most tantalizing of those mysteries is reports of methane detection on the Red Planet. Here on Earth, significant amounts of methane is produced by microbes helping livestock digest plants. The digestion process ends with livestock exhaling gas into the air.
The ESA has reported it is using data originally gathered for what it terms spacecraft "housekeeping" gathered aboard the Rosetta and Mars Express missions to learn more about cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are bursts of high-energy radiation, and the data gathered by the spacecraft helps scientists understand how cosmic rays behave at Mars and in the inner solar system. The housekeeping data gathered by the spacecraft and its components is typically used by engineering teams to monitor the health of the spacecraft and diagnose faults.
Building and launching satellites is an expensive proposition, and there are companies around the world looking to make that cheaper. The ESA has announced it will put the first wooden satellite into orbit. The sunlight is called the WISA Woodsat, and it's a 10x10x10 cm CubeSat nanosatellite built from standardized boxes.
The ESA has chosen its large-class science mission themes for the timeframe between 2035 and 2050. The missions fall under the Voyage 2050 umbrella and will focus in part on moons orbiting some of the massive planets in the solar system. The mission will also investigate temperate exoplanets and the early universe. ESA director of science Gunther Hasinger says that the selection of Voyage 2050 themes is pivotal for the ESA science program.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are collaborating on a new Venus probe, with EnVision headed to our distant Solar System neighbor as part of a trio of spacecraft set to unlock unprecedented insights. The ESA announced EnVision had been given the green-light today, with the new Venus orbiter to carry NASA's Synthetic Aperture Radar.
NASA has pushed back the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, another delay for the Hubble successor, though the aim is still to have the huge and complex instrument heading to its new home in space before the end of the year. The team behind the telescope project - a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) - had previously intended to launch on October 31, 2021.
NASA, ESA, and JAXA have announced they will be hosting a hackathon to study the environmental effects of COVID-19. The hackathon will run from June 23 through June 29 and is officially called the Earth Observation Dashboard Hackathon. All around the world, many countries have taken similar steps in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including large-scale lockdowns and mass deployment of personal protective equipment such as masks.
One of the Antarctic ice sheets is called the Ronne Ice Shelf and is located in the Weddell Sea. The European Space Agency (ESA) has reported that a gigantic iceberg has calved from the western side of the ice shelf. The iceberg has been dubbed A-76 and measures 4320 square kilometers in size, making it the largest iceberg in the world.