ESA Science & Technology - News Archive
News archive
News archive
Key technology for ESA's exoplanet-hunting PLATO spacecraft has passed a trial by vacuum to prove the mission will work as planned. This test replica of an 80-cm high, 12-cm aperture camera spent 17 days inside a thermal vacuum chamber.
Proposals are solicited for observations with INTEGRAL in response to the nineteenth Announcement of Opportunity, AO-19, issued 1 March 2021. This AO covers the period January 2022 to December 2022. The deadline for proposals is 9 April 2021, 14:00 CEST.
Observing time on CHEOPS in the Guest Observers Programme has been awarded to nine proposals received in response to the CHEOPS second Announcement of Opportunity (AO-2).
ESA's exoplanet mission CHEOPS has revealed a unique planetary system consisting of six exoplanets, five of which are locked in a rare rhythmic dance as they orbit their central star. The sizes and masses of the planets, however, don't follow such an orderly pattern.
The optical and infrared instruments of Euclid, ESA's mission to study dark energy and dark matter in space, have passed their qualification and acceptance reviews and are now fully integrated into the spacecraft's payload module.
The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD 106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed "Planet Nine."
Solar Orbiter's latest results show that the mission is making the first direct connections between events at the solar surface and what's happening in interplanetary space around the spacecraft. It is also giving us new insights into solar 'campfires', space weather and disintegrating comets.
Astronomers have caught a rare glimpse of a rapidly fading shroud of gas around an aging star. Archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the nebula Hen 3-1357, nicknamed the Stingray nebula, has faded precipitously over just the past two decades.
The motion of stars in the outskirts of our galaxy hints at significant changes in the history of the Milky Way. This and other equally fascinating results come from a set of papers that demonstrate the quality of ESA's Gaia Early third Data Release (EDR3), which is made public today.
The ESA-NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is celebrating its twenty-fifth launch anniversary.
New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides further evidence for tidal disruption in the galaxy NGC 1052-DF4. This result explains a previous finding that this galaxy is missing most of its dark matter.
Today, ESA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Infrared Space Observatory, ISO, with a brand new interface to the mission's unique legacy archive.
ESA's exoplanet mission Ariel, scheduled for launch in 2029, has moved from study to implementation phase, following which an industrial contractor will be selected to build the spacecraft.
Proposals are solicited in response to the second Announcement of Opportunity (AO-2) for observing time in the CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme. This AO covers the period 26 March 2021 to 25 March 2022. The deadline for proposals is 1 December 2020, 13:00 CET/12:00 GMT.
Using data from the international Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, scientists have found that there are two distinct types of craters on Saturn's largest moon Titan that are still being shaped by erosion.
After years of detective work, the second touchdown site of Rosetta's Philae lander has been located on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in a site that resembles the shape of a skull. Philae left its imprint in billions-of-years-old ice, revealing that the comet's icy interior is softer than cappuccino froth.
The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission has completed the first of two Venus flybys needed to set it on course with the Solar System's innermost planet, Mercury.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS/JAXA) have announced their decision to no longer consider the infrared space observatory, SPICA, as a candidate for the upcoming selection as ESA's 5th medium-class mission in its Cosmic Vision...
ESA's Science Programme Committee has confirmed the continued operations of five missions led by ESA's Science Programme: Cluster, Gaia, INTEGRAL, Mars Express, and XMM-Newton, from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2022. The SPC also confirmed the Science Programme's contributions to the extended operations of Hinode, Hubble Space Telescope,...
The NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has tracked the fading light of a supernova in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light years away. Supernovae like this one can be used as cosmic tape measures, allowing astronomers to calculate the distance to their galaxies.