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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today a report delivered new HD images from the Gemini South telescope in Chile showing the birth of a star. These images were captured using a wide-field adaptive optics camera in combination with the telescope, producing near-infrared composite images of a 33 trillion-mile section of The Western Wall of the Carina Nebula.
Mars may be home to multiple lakes hidden from sight under the planet's surface, according to a new study. Researchers say they've found evidence of three new lakes on the Red Planet, adding them to the one discovered back in 2018. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy and were made possible using data from the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft.
The CHEOPS space telescope delivered details to scientists on the planet called WASP-189b, an extreme planet by most metrics. This planet is approximately 20x closer to its closest star than our Earth is to our Sun. This planet is more than 1.6x as large as Jupiter, which in turn is around 318x as large as Earth.
Last Wednesday, the European Space Agency successfully launched its Vega rocket from French Guiana after around a year of delays. The launch took place from Europe's Spaceport and involved deploying 53 small satellites into orbit -- a mission that ended up a complete success, according to the ESA. The space agency says this mission demonstrated that Vega and the wider Small Spacecraft Mission Service dispenser is capable of offering launch services to customers.