ESA Science & Technology - Science & Technology

12 December 2019

CHEOPS, ESA's 'Characterising Exoplanet Satellite', is scheduled for launch from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 08:54 UTC (09:54 CET) on 17 December 2019.
Follow the launch live at esawebtv.esa.int. The programme starts at 08:30 UTC (09:30 CET).

23 October 2019

The assembly of the flight model of ESA's JUICE spacecraft began in September, with the delivery of the spacecraft's primary structure, followed by integration of the propulsion system that will enable the mission to reach and study Jupiter and its moons.

10 October 2019

This is the first entry in the Euclid Test Campaign Journal, a series of articles covering the main events during testing of the Structural and Thermal Model (STM) and Flight Model (FM) of the spacecraft.

 

23 September 2019

An important stage in the development of ESA's Solar Orbiter mission was completed between May and June, when a series of tests to validate the electromagnetic compatibility and magnetic properties was carried out on the spacecraft's flight model.

25 June 2019It takes collaboration and teamwork to operate a spacecraft. As the CHEOPS launch approaches, a Europe-wide team is preparing to take control of inflight activities once the satellite is in space.

27 August 2019The Solar wind-Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission is still four years away from launch, but scientists are already using existing ESA satellites, such as the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory and the Cluster mission studying Earth's magnetosphere, to pave the way for this pioneering venture.

17 May 2019ESA's Gaia mission has been busy mapping our Milky Way galaxy since 2014, and just over one year ago released its second batch of data on more than one billion stars. Since then, astronomers have been exploring this catalogue to reveal a huge amount of new information about the cosmos. One type of object that has seen an abundance of new...

13 May 2019One has a thick poisonous atmosphere, one has hardly any atmosphere at all, and one is just right for life to flourish – but it wasn't always that way. The atmospheres of our two neighbours Venus and Mars can teach us a lot about the past and future scenarios for our own planet.