ESO Top News

A study using data from ESA’s Swarm mission suggests that faint magnetic signatures created by Earth’s tides can help us determine magma distribution under the seabed and could even give us insights into long-term trends in global ocean temperatures and salinity.

A capacity increase by almost 80%! In late July 2024, the Malargüe deep-space communication station completed an important upgrade of its antenna feed that will allow missions to send much more data back to Earth.

Week in images: 13-17 January 2025

Discover our week through the lens

Image: Seed-sized space chip

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice.

The largest photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations, unveils hundreds of millions of stars. It took more than 10 years to collect data for this colorful portrait of our neighbouring galaxy and was created from more than 600 snapshots. This stunning, colourful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars, and is spread across roughly 2.5 billion pixels.

With ESA’s EarthCARE satellite and four measuring instruments all working extremely well and fully commissioned, the mission’s ‘first level’ data stream is now freely available.

By combining data from all four instruments, scientists ultimately aim to address a critical Earth science question: how do clouds and aerosols affect the heating and cooling of our atmosphere?

There is an increasing willingness in the space sector to tackle the problem of space debris. Yet much of the required technology to mitigate or prevent its risks is still missing.

Preventing new debris, avoiding collisions and the timely clearance of satellites from orbit at their end-of-mission are complex challenges that each require a variety of practical solutions.

Released to the public on 15 January 2025, the Zero Debris Technical Booklet is a community-driven document that identifies technologies that will contribute to the goal of Zero Debris by 2030. Essentially, the Booklet forms a technical Zero Debris 'to-do list'.

Three InCubed satellites have launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, highlighting ESA’s role as partner to industry and its support for business and technology innovation.

Video: 00:02:05

This is a new artist’s animation of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.

Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even seemingly simple ideas about the nature of our galaxy’s central bar and the spiral arms have been overturned. Gaia has shown us that it has more than two spiral arms and that they are less prominent than we previously thought. In addition, Gaia has shown that its central bar is more inclined with respect to the Sun.

No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so we can’t take a selfie, but Gaia is giving us the best insight yet of what our home galaxy looks like. Once all of Gaia’s observations collected over the past decade are made available in two upcoming data releases, we can expect an even sharper view of the Milky Way.

Click here to download the still image of the Milky Way.

The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

This year will mark the European Space Agency’s 50th anniversary and promises to be a landmark year for the European aerospace industry. In addition to milestone events in our programmes, September will also mark 30 years of satellite navigation for Europe. This spring brings the second commercial mission involving a project astronaut to the International Space Station on Axiom Mission 4, while events such as ESA's Living Planet Symposium and the International Paris Air Show will gather the space community face to face.

Video: 00:01:36

Fly over Mercury with BepiColombo for the final time during the mission’s epic expedition around the Sun. The ESA/JAXA spacecraft captured these images of the Solar System's smallest planet on 7 and 8 January 2025, before and during its sixth encounter with Mercury. This was its final planetary flyby until it enters orbit around the planet in late 2026.  

The video begins with BepiColombo's approach to Mercury, showing images taken by onboard monitoring cameras 1 and 2 (M-CAM 1 and M-CAM 2) between 16:59 CET on 7 January and 01:45 CET on 8 January. During this time, the spacecraft moved from 106 019 to 42 513 km from Mercury's surface. The view from M-CAM 1 is along a 15-metre-long solar array, whereas M-CAM 2 images show an antenna and boom in the foreground. 

After emerging into view from behind the solar array, Mercury appears to jump to the right. Both the spacecraft and its solar arrays rotated in preparation for passing through Mercury's cold, dark shadow.   

For several hours after these first images were taken, the part of Mercury’s surface illuminated by the Sun was no longer visible from the M-CAMs. BepiColombo's closest approach to Mercury took place in darkness at 06:58:52 CET on 8 January, when it got as close as 295 km.  

Shortly after re-emerging into the intense sunlight, the spacecraft peered down onto the planet's north pole, imaging several craters whose floors are in permanent shadow. The long shadows in this region are particularly striking on the floor of Prokofiev crater (the largest crater to the right of centre) – the central peak of that crater casts spiky shadows that exaggerate the shape of this mountain.  

Next, we have a beautiful view of Mercury crossing the field of view from left to right, seen first by M-CAM 1 then by M-CAM 2 between 07:06 and 07:49 CET. These images showcase the planet's northern plains, which were smoothed over billions of years ago when massive amounts of runny lava flowed across Mercury's cratered surface.  

The background music is The Hebrides overture, composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830 after being inspired by a visit to Fingal’s Cave, a sea cave created by ancient lava flows on the island of Staffa, Scotland. Similarly shaped by lava is Mercury's Mendelssohn crater, one of the large craters visible passing from left to right above the solar array in M-CAM 1's views, and at the very bottom of M-CAM 2's views. The Mendelssohn crater was flooded with lava after an impact originally created it. 

The end of the video lingers on the final three close-up images that the M-CAMs will ever obtain of Mercury. The cameras will continue to operate until September 2026, fulfilling their role of monitoring various parts of the spacecraft. After that point, the spacecraft module carrying the M-CAMs will separate from BepiColombo's other two parts, ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio). MPO’s much more powerful science cameras will take over from the M-CAMs, mapping Mercury over a range of colours in visible and infrared light.

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton has detected rapidly fluctuating X-rays coming from the very edge of a supermassive black hole in the heart of a nearby galaxy. The results paint a fascinating picture that defies how we thought matter falls into such black holes, and points to a potential source of gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission, LISA, could see.

Slovenia has celebrated its status the European Space Agency's 23rd Member State with a day of space activities including a primetime television broadcast from the Herman Potočnik Noordung Space Technology Center in Vitanje.

Week in images: 06-10 January 2025

Discover our week through the lens

Image: Five wildfires are still currently burning (as of 10 January) in areas of north Los Angeles. This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on 9 January 2025, shows the Palisades and the Eaton fires, with smoke seen reaching Catalina Island and the Santa Barbara reserve.

Video: 01:22:54

Watch the replay of ESA's start-of-the-year press briefing looking ahead to 2025.

 

Download the presentation slides.

On 8 January 2025, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission flew past Mercury for the sixth time, successfully completing the final ‘gravity assist manoeuvre’ needed to steer it into orbit around the planet in late 2026. The spacecraft flew just a few hundred kilometres above the planet's north pole. Close-up images expose possibly icy craters whose floors are in permanent shadow, and the vast sunlit northern plains.

Image: Fanned by very strong winds, a wildfire is ripping through the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, California. This image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission vividly depicts the smoke billowing from the fire near Santa Monica on 7 January 2025, not long after the fire broke out.