Latest ESA Stories

ESA provides crime prevention insight and best practices in honor of National Police Week (PRWEB) May 16, 2013 Last month, the nation watched in horror as tragedies unfolded in Boston, Mass. and West, Texas. In the days that followed, numerous stories emerged about heroic actions of police officers, serving as a reminder of why they are vital to the safety and security of cities as large as Boston and towns as small as West. In honor of National Police Week (May 12-18), the Electronic...

ESA Steer tractors with centimeter-accuracy to improve farming and the environment. Navtronics, a Belgium ESA Business Incubation Centre start-up company, is tailoring intelligent guidance for agricultural machinery using advanced satnav. As any other industry, the agriculture sector is always looking for ways to raise productivity and reduce labor cost through new technologies. One is the use of high-end Real Time Kinematic (RTK) satellite navigation to steer and control tractors...

University researchers study convicted burglars to prove effectiveness of alarms, shed light on habits and decision-making. Irving, TX (PRWEB) May 10, 2013 There’s no better way to figure out what motivates a burglar than to go directly to the source: Just ask the burglar. A groundbreaking new study by a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte examines hundreds of convicted offenders to gain an unprecedented look inside the mind of a burglar, providing remarkable...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists around the world are meeting in Spain this week to talk about the threat asteroids pose to Earth. Deimos Space, an industrial partner working for the European Space Agency's (ESA) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program, has invited researchers from universities, research institutes, national space agencies and space industry professionals to discuss Near-Earth Object (NEO) threat mitigation and effects. NEOs are...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel spacecraft has revealed that the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy is about to get a taste of some hot molecular gas. Sagittarius A has a mass of about four million times that of our Sun and sits about 26,000 light-years away from us. It is a few hundred times closer to us than any other galaxy with an active black hole at its center, making it ideal for studying these...

[WATCH VIDEO: Vega Launch Sequence Replay] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online After a delayed launch due to strong wind conditions on Saturday May 4, ESA's Vega rocket lifted off early Tuesday (02:06 GMT May 7) on a complex mission to set three payloads into two different orbits. The ESA successfully launched the rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, carrying Proba-V, VNREDSat-1 and ESTCube-1. Tuesday’s launch was the second mission for...

ESA International development banks often invest in regions where projects can be difficult to monitor and evaluate. Earth-observing satellites are proving to be important tools for the development sector. From 800 km high, satellites enable objective observations consistently over space and time. They can detect changes in land cover, monitor water quality and identify pollutants, evaluate the health of a coral reef or help assess how coastal zones are influenced by sea-level rise....

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel observatory has officially run out of liquid coolant, ending its mission. The space observatory launched nearly four years ago with a goal to help reveal some of the cooler sides of the universe, including planet, star and galaxy formation. "Herschel gave us the opportunity to peer into the dark and cold regions of the universe that are invisible to other telescopes," said John Grunsfel,...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Update (May 6 at 10:15 a.m.) ESA’s second Vega flight, VV02, due for a launch this past weekend, was canceled at last minute due to unfavorable weather conditions. The Vega rocket was scheduled to lift off on May 4 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, carrying Proba-V as the prime payload. Proba-V is the first of four ESA missions in the Vega Research and Technology Accompaniment (VERTA) program, which will...

ESA Simply getting anything into space is tough, but doing so against a strict deadline can be really stressful. Researchers in an ESA laboratory nervously checked the clock as they extracted immune cells – beginning a full dress rehearsal to prepare a time-critical experiment for launch. An international team led by a NASA astronaut gathered at ESA’s Life and Physical Sciences and Life Support Laboratory at ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, earlier this month....