ESA Science & Technology - News Archive

The magnetic and particle environment around Mercury was sampled by BepiColombo for the first time during the mission's close flyby of the planet at 199 km on 1-2 October 2021, while the huge gravitational pull of the planet was felt by its accelerometers.

The James Webb Space Telescope has arrived safely at Pariacabo harbour in French Guiana. ESA in close collaboration with NASA will now prepare this once in a generation mission for its launch on Ariane 5 from Europe's Spaceport this December.

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby last night.

When tested in space-like conditions, the instrument on ESA's Euclid space telescope set to measure the velocities of fast-receding galaxies abruptly stopped operating. Blindsided, the mission team feared it might take weeks or even months of extra time to uncover the reason why. Then a newly-convened ESA Tiger Team came to their assistance.

ESA, NASA and Arianespace have jointly defined 18 December 2021 as the target launch date for Ariane 5 flight VA256. This third Ariane 5 launch of 2021 will fly the James Webb Space Telescope to space from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.

The 40-year-old mystery of what causes Jupiter's X-ray auroras has been solved. For the first time, astronomers have seen the entire mechanism at work – and it could be a process occurring in many other parts of the Universe too.

The international James Webb Space Telescope has passed the final mission analysis review for its launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.

While exploring two exoplanets in a bright nearby star system, ESA's exoplanet-hunting CHEOPS satellite has unexpectedly spotted the system's third known planet crossing the face of the star. This transit reveals exciting details about a rare planet "with no known equivalent", say the researchers.

ESA's large-class science missions for the timeframe 2035-2050 will focus on moons of the giant Solar System planets, temperate exoplanets or the galactic ecosystem, and new physical probes of the early Universe.

EnVision will be ESA's next Venus orbiter, providing a holistic view of the planet from its inner core to upper atmosphere to determine how and why Venus and Earth evolved so differently.

Thanks to ESA's star mapping spacecraft Gaia and machine learning, astronomers have discovered 12 quasars whose light is so strongly deflected by foreground galaxies that they are each visible as four distinct images, called an 'Einstein cross'.

The General Observer scientific observations for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope's first year of operation have been selected. Proposals from ESA member states comprise 33% of the total number of selected proposals and correspond to 30% of the available telescope time on Webb.

This 7th Announcement of Opportunity (AO), open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States, solicits proposals for participation as Science Planners in the NASA-led IRIS mission. The deadline for receipt of proposals is 19 April 2021, 12:00 (noon) CEST.

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."