Fingers crossed for our new European launcher 🤞

TLDR:

June 18 : wet dress rehearsal

Launch: first two weeks of July

Tentative date to be announced during ILA airshow between 5-9 of June

The French space agency CNES has announced a partnership with Spartan Space, the Institute of Space Medicine and Physiology (MEDES), and the sporting goods retailer Decathlon to develop a European intra-vehicular activity (IVA) spacesuit.

ESA’s Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) mission is getting ready for lift-off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, California, with a target launch date of no earlier than 28 May 2024. Save the date and watch the launch live on ESA WebTV or ESA YouTube.

Can I ask how everyone personally feels about using nuclear material for space exploration? For the rovers heating elements it will be just a couple of grams but for generating electricity via a RTG a spacecraft would require several kilograms of radioactive material.

Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope may have detected atmospheric gases surrounding 55 Cancri e, a hot rocky exoplanet 41 light-years from Earth. This is the best evidence to date for the existence of a rocky planet atmosphere outside our Solar System.

Fingers crossed that it's not affecting the mission objectives

Save the date: this year’s annual ESA Open Day in the Netherlands will take place on Sunday 8 October, at the Agency’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk. Registration to attend will be opened later this summer; keep an eye on this webpage and social media for further details.

This will be the 12th annual ESA Open Day in the Netherlands. The venue will be our European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, which is the largest space establishment in Europe, offering visitors to the chance to meet space engineers and astronauts and see actual space hardware.

This year’s theme is ‘Science Fiction Gets Real’, highlighting how science fiction has inspired scientists and engineers to join ESA, and turn once imaginary concepts into science fact.

Trying out space mission design Trying out space mission design Taking place as part of the NL Space Campus’s Space Week, the ESA Open Day is also partnering with Dutch Weekend van de Wetenschap.

ESTEC’s year-round visitor centre Space Expo will also be open for the Open Day while Space Rocks will have a full roster of events, to celebrate the art and culture of science and space.

The NL Space tent will present cutting-edge work done by the Dutch space sector while the Netherlands Space Office, NSO, will be launching its new Moonshots NL ’24 initiative, giving Dutch students the chance to work on space exploration projects along with actual astronauts.

Each year thousands of visitors attend the ESA Open Days in the Netherlands. Sunday’s general Open Day is preceded by an Open Day for people with a disability on Saturday, the day before, allowing visitors to explore the sprawling site at their own pace – because space is for everyone!

The Ariane 6 rocket officially won’t launch until 2024. The European Space Agency (ESA) gave an update to the Ariane 6 development on Tuesday, formally announcing a launch period for the inaugural flight is projected for 2024. Previous ESA updates indicated a very tight timeline to make a 2023 debut.

This image shows the irregular galaxy NGC 6822, which was observed by the Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) mounted on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. As their names suggest, NIRCam and MIRI probe different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows the instruments to observe different components of the same galaxy, with MIRI especially sensitive to its gas-rich regions (the yellow swirls in this image) and NIRCam suitable for observing its densely packed field of stars.

Source

Webb’s infrared image of the galaxy cluster El Gordo (“the Fat One”) reveals hundreds of galaxies, some never before seen at this level of detail. El Gordo acts as a gravitational lens, distorting and magnifying the light from distant background galaxies. Two of the most prominent features in the image include the Thin One, highlighted in box A, and the Fishhook, a red swoosh highlighted in box B. Both are lensed background galaxies. The insets at right show zoomed-in views of both objects.

[Image description: The left two-thirds of the frame shows a field of small galaxies on a black background. Near the center of the image, a long, thin line is outlined with a white box and labeled A. At upper right, a red swoosh nearly encircling two galaxies is outlined with a white box and labeled B. The right third of the frame shows zoomed in views of the two regions in the boxes. At top in box A, a thin mottled line extends from upper left to lower right with a handful of background objects. At bottom in box B, a red swoosh wraps around from upper left to lower right, nearly encircling two small galaxies located at one o’clock and seven o’clock.]

Source

The summer fire season is well under way in Europe – countries all around the Mediterranean are experiencing record temperatures coupled with huge wildfires that have led to mass evacuations. In this enthralling new ESA documentary, explore how people on the frontline are using space to better monitor and fight the flames.

Follow the incredible stories of the firefighters who dealt with unprecedented fires in Gironde, France, and the forest officers using satellite data to plan for the forests’ recovery. Journey into the heart of Earth's elemental might and discover how space is changing the game for monitoring volcanic eruptions too – including one of the world’s most studied volcano, Mount Etna.

FIRE is the first episode of ESA’s new series centred around the elements and showcases how Earth observation has become crucial to those fighting climate change on the ground.

Es ist ein Manöver, das die Satellitenspezialisten der Europäischen Raumfahrtagentur Esa im Kontrollzentrum in Darmstadt so noch nie geflogen sind: Erstmals soll ein Esa-Satellit, der nicht dafür konzipiert wurde, kontrolliert in die Erdatmosphäre gelenkt werden.

Die Raumfahrtagentur will so das Risiko verringern, dass Trümmerteile auf Landflächen stürzen. Außerdem soll die Gefahr verkleinert werden, dass der Satellit mit anderen Objekten in der Erdumlaufbahn kollidiert und so noch mehr Weltraumschrott entsteht.

ESA’s wind mission Aeolus is coming home. After five years of improving weather forecasts, the satellite will return in a first-of-its-kind assisted reentry. At ESA’s Space Operations Centre in Germany, mission control will use the satellite’s remaining fuel to steer Aeolus during its return to Earth.