The European Space Agency's mission to Mars has successfully begun, though it'll be seven months before the Proton rocket reaches the red planet. ExoMars 2016 aims to sift through the Martian atmosphere in search of methane and other trace gases which, the scientists suggest, might indicate that there are active biological or geological processes underway on the distant planet.
As part of the ExoMars 2016 mission, a new unmanned spacecraft will be departing for Mars on Monday thanks to collaboration between the space agencies of Europe and Russia. The European Space Agency (ESA) notes that the probe is heading to the red planet to study its atmosphere and dust storms, and to get there it will be riding atop a Russian Proton rocket.
Scientists from NASA and the ESA have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to a new distance record. The record comes as the team of researchers has broken the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most distant galaxy ever seen in the Universe. According to scientists, the galaxy they measured existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang.
The European Space Agency has published images of a Mars region showing marks left by water in the Red Planet’s distant past. According to the ESA, water has left “a variety” of marks on Mars, parts of which have been captured as part of the agency’s Mars Express mission. A large impact basin is shown in the newly published images, as well as thin grooves that had been cut by flowing water long ago.
As we bid farewell to the comet lander Philae for the last time, we look back and remember three important things we learned from the ESA's monumental mission. Several firsts were achieved by this lander sent to a comet by the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. One: this was the first time that a craft such as this was successfully landed on a comet - not only that, but the first time such a lander was able to send back data on a comet from its surface, too!
The European Space Agency has confirmed that ice found on the comet 67P's surface is water. Some parts of the comet have “significant” amounts of water ice, while other portions of the comet’s surface have lesser amounts. The confirmation comes a long while after Rosetta arrived at the comet in 2014 and observed ice a short while later.
Bot the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope have been used to study a collection of 10 planets. Each of these planets is Jupiter-like. They look similar, but come in a wide array of different colors. Gasses are present, and heat - lots and lots of heat. Each orbits very close to its host star, making their study far more difficult than the average non-gas planet. The image you're seeing here is an artist's rendering of the hot 10 - in reality we're only able to see them in very, very tiny dots.
For many people, being on the International Space Station would be a good excuse to put off running that marathon you’ve been planning for a few years. Not so for ESA astronaut Tim Peake who plans to run the London Marathon next April…from space. He’ll do so on a treadmill located in the International Space Station’s Tranquility Node while a medical team keeps tabs on his health to make sure nothing goes awry.
The European Space Agency (ESA) will be conducting its first mission to the planet Mercury in 2017, dubbed BepiColombo. As part of an open house for the public earlier this month, the ESA put the three spacecraft that will be used in the mission on display. The two orbiters and one electric propulsion module are still in testing, so they remained enclosed in glass in cleanroom conditions during the public viewing.
The ESA has announced that it has made a breakthrough that has allowed an astronaut orbiting on the ISS 400km above the earth to control a rover on the ground with precision. Astronaut Andreas Mogensen remotely operated a rover and its robotic arm using a force-feedback control system that was developed by the ESA.
Glacial melt so dramatic it can be seen from space sounds like bad news, but it makes for some incredible images, as the latest Arctic shots prove. Both NASA and the European Space Agency have released the newest camerawork from their satellites tracking climate change, showing vast chunks of ice as they shift and melt off Greenland in July and August.
While it's been widely accepted that the Universe is slowly fading since the late 1990s, a study published today shows the great extent to which its death is occurring. "The Universe has basically sat down on the soft, pulled up a blanket, and is about to nod off for an eternal doze," suggested Simon Driver of ICRAR, lead author on the study. Measurements of energy output of each of 200,000 galaxies has been done at 21 wavelengths, from far infrared back down to ultraviolet. As broad a wavelength range as possible was studied by researchers who've now concluded that, yes, the Universe is indeed fading out.
