ESA

Each year when spring arrives in southern Mars, a strange cloud of water ice emerges near the extremely tall Arsia Mons volcano. The cloud stretches for hundreds of kilometers before it fades away over hours. Researchers have been performing a detailed long-term study of the phenomena and has discovered the secret of the elongated cloud using observations from the Mars WebCam on the ESA Mars Express spacecraft.

Continue Reading

Back in 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) asked for ideas for detecting, mapping, and exploring lunar caves. The ESA selected five of those ideas to be studied in more detail, with each addressing a different phase of a potential mission to the moon for exploring lunar caves. There were five Sysnova studies, and three mission scenarios were developed.

Continue Reading

There are several disaster movies out there that show what it might be like if a giant asteroid or comet impacted the earth. Asteroids have hit the earth in the distant past, and one such impact is credited with wiping the vast majority of dinosaurs off the planet. One of the most concerning asteroids that passes through our solar system is known as Apophis.

Continue Reading

The ESA is currently operating a scientific mission in space using the Solar Orbiter known as Solo by the team operating it. The spacecraft has been in orbit for a year, having launched on February 10, 2020. Its mission is to image the sun and observe the solar wind while attempting to unravel many lingering mysteries about the solar cycle.

Continue Reading

This week the United Arab Emirates reached orbit around the red planet Mars. The Hope spacecraft launched all the way back in July of 2020 and just reached Mars here on the 9th of February, 2021. "This has been a remarkable journey of humanity," said UAE Space Agency chairperson Sarah Al Amiri. This is the UAE's first ever interplanetary mission.

Continue Reading

Last Thursday, a massive amount of information was released to astronomers from the ESA Gaia space observatory. The data provides an incredibly detailed map of the Milky Way described as the best of its sort ever available. The new map has information on the positions, distance, and motion of 1.8 billion cosmic objects.

Continue Reading

The ESA has signed a contract with an industrial team led by ClearSpace SA worth €86 million to remove a specific piece of space debris. Under the contract, ClearSpace SA will launch the first active debris removal mission known as ClearSpace-1. That mission will rendezvous with, capture, and push a Vespa payload adapter in the atmosphere where it will burn up.

Continue Reading

SpaceX successfully launched the NASA and ESA satellite known as Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Launch occurred without a hitch Saturday putting the satellite into the orbit it needed to peer down at the earth and observe our oceans. The satellite will be able to measure sea levels across 90 percent of the oceans around the world within a few centimeters.

Continue Reading

The European Space Agency has announced that the Atmospheric remote-sensing infrared exoplanet large-survey (Ariel) mission has moved from the study phase to the implementation phase. An industrial contractor will be selected to build the spacecraft. Ariel's mission is to study what exoplanets are made of and how they form and evolve.

Continue Reading

Yesterday, October 31, 2020, marks exactly a year before NASA intends to put its high-tech and extremely powerful James Webb Space Telescope into orbit. The launch date for the telescope is currently set for October 31, 2021. That will be a Sunday, and scientists all around the world are greatly anticipating the launch.

Continue Reading

NASA and the ESA have announced that they have finalized an agreement to collaborate on the Artemis Gateway. NASA says the agreement is an important part of its effort to engage international partners in sustainable lunar exploration and to demonstrate future technologies needed for a mission to Mars. The agreement was signed on Tuesday, marking NASA's first formal commitment to launching an international crew to the lunar vicinity as part of the Artemis missions.

Continue Reading

A joint mission conducted by the ESA and the Japanese space agency JAXA called BepiColombo recently made a close approach to Venus. The close approach happened on October 15, and the main sequence of 64 images was captured by the Monitoring Camera 2 aboard the Mercury Transfer Module.

Continue Reading