ESO Top News

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us at the Brazilian-Bolivian border over part of the Pantanal region, a unique ecosystem, home to an impressive variety of plants and wildlife.

Already recognised for its excellence and even adopted for operational weather forecasting, the European Space Agency’s Arctic Weather Satellite has now fulfilled its most important role. This small prototype mission has succeeded in paving the way for a new constellation of similar satellites, known as EPS-Sterna.

Image: A celebrity cluster in the spotlight

εpsilon

The 18th European Space Conference (ESC) will take place on 27 and 28 January 2026 at the Square Convention Centre in Brussels, Belgium.

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.

To land on the right foot on the Red Planet, European engineers have been dropping a skeleton of the four-legged ExoMars descent module at various speeds and heights on simulated martian surfaces.

Image: Helix Nebula (NIRCam image)

Image: This image, captured by Copernicus Sentinel-3 on 18 January 2026, shows clouds of smoke from wildfires on the coast of Chile.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Weather Office is closely monitoring a notable space weather event, first detected 18:09 UTC on Sunday, 18 January 2026. We are collecting detailed information from our expert service centres.

Further details and updates will be provided here as they become available.

This page was last updated on 20 January 2026, at 14:00 CET.

Image: Proba-3: our eyes on the Sun’s inner corona

Dreaming of a career in space? The 2026 ESA Graduate Trainee opportunities are launching soon! It’s time to polish up your CV, craft your motivation letter and get ready to reach for the stars.

As we prepare for missions beyond Earth orbit, one crucial challenge remains: keeping astronauts healthy in microgravity. Without daily exercise, their muscles, bones and cardiovascular systems weaken, which could impact mission success and astronaut safety, especially in destinations such as the Moon or Mars, where crew will have to operate autonomously immediately after landing.

Week in images: 12-16 January 2026

Discover our week through the lens

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image over the South Atlantic Ocean features a close-up view of the A23a iceberg, once the world’s largest. The unusually cloud-free image shows the first signs that the iceberg will soon disintegrate completely.

After more than 10 years in orbit, the first Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite, Sentinel-2A, is still finding new ways to contribute to Earth observation. With its younger siblings, Sentinel-2B and Sentinel-2C, now leading the mission’s core task of delivering high-resolution, ‘camera-like’ images of Earth’s surface, the European Space Agency is pushing Sentinel-2A beyond its original remit.

In recent trials, this elderly satellite was even switched on at night to see how it would perform in the dark – and the results have been strikingly positive, offering encouraging news for the follow-on Copernicus Sentinel-2 Next Generation mission, currently in development.

Week in images: 05-09 January 2026

Discover our week through the lens