Latest ESA Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online In the wake of the recent meteor explosion above Russia, the European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the selection of a target for their proposed Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA). The AIDA mission, which is a joint project headed up by European and American astronomers, will attempt to intercept asteroid Didymos, which the ESA says is a “binary,” featuring two asteroids – one approximately 800 meters...

ESA [ Watch The Video Sea-Surface Salinity and Currents ] ESA’s water mission is shedding new light on the meandering Gulf Stream, just one of the SMOS satellite’s numerous achievements. Launched in 2009, ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite has been helping us to understand the water cycle. Over the past three years it has been providing more accurate information on global soil moisture and ocean salinity. New results unveiled today in Spain show that SMOS...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA has selected key contributions to a 2022 European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will study Jupiter and three of its largest moons in unprecedented detail. The moons are thought to harbor vast water oceans beneath their icy surfaces. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) NASA's contribution will consist of one U.S.-led science instrument and hardware for two European instruments to fly on ESA's...

ESA The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission, JUICE, will carry a total of 11 scientific experiments to study the gas giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons, ESA announced today. JUICE is the first Large-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. Planned for launch in 2022 and arrival at Jupiter in 2030, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the biggest planet in the Solar System and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As it turns out, studying our Sun can be rather difficult. It’s not the distance so much that keeps scientists guessing – although that certainly doesn’t help. The Sun’s intense heat also keeps scientists at bay, leaving them to make some of their observations and predictions based purely on context and far away measurements. One thing astronomers have been able to observe is a significant difference in temperatures...

ESA Good news for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security program: the European Council has secured the program’s EU funding through 2020. The multiannual financial framework – MFF – is a seven-year plan for the EU’s budget. On 8 February, European heads of State and government agreed to include GMES in the 2014–20 MFF. Within the new framework, €3786 million was allocated for GMES. This amount covers GMES Services, In-Situ Component (a network of...

ESA The first firm details of the 15 February asteroid impact in Russia, the largest in more than a century, are becoming clear. ESA is carefully assessing the information as crucial input for developing the Agency’s asteroid-hunting effort. At 03:20 GMT on 15 February, a natural object entered the atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Extensive video records indicate a northeast to southwest path at a shallow angle of 20° above the horizontal. The...

ESA For decades, scientists have disagreed about whether the sea is higher or lower heading north along the east coast of North America. Thanks to precision gravity data from ESA’s GOCE satellite, this controversial issue has now been settled. The answer? It’s lower. Many might assume that the height of the sea is the same everywhere – but this is not true because winds, currents, tides and different temperatures cause seawater to pile up in some regions and dip in others....

ESA A beautiful and expensive sight: upwards of €6 million-worth of silicon wafers, crammed with the complex integrated circuits that sit at the heart of each and every ESA mission. Years of meticulous design work went into these tiny brains, empowering satellites with intelligence. The image shows a collection of six silicon wafers that contain some 14 different chip designs developed by several European companies during the last eight years with ESA’s financial and technical...

ESA ESA and NASA have joined forces to ensure that Sentinel-2 and the newly launched Landsat Data Continuity Mission offer compatible data products, thereby bringing greater benefits to users of images of Earth’s land and coastal zones. ESA is currently developing the two-satellite Sentinel-2 mission for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative. With the first satellite slated for launch in 2014, this innovative mission is dedicated to supplying...