he SAFER field trial rover, Bridget, on its way to the first science target in the Atacama Desert on 8 October 2013, following a route uploaded from its Remote Control Centre in Harwell, UK.

Visitors to the Rosetta stand at the ESTEC Open Day on 6 October 2013 watched ‘cook a comet’ demonstrations to illustrate aspects of comet science that the Rosetta mission will explore at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014.

The comet analogue was made by mixing together dirt, dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide), water, and a slug of chocolate sauce to represent the organic chemistry of comets. Thick gloves are needed to handle the dry ice to protect against cold ‘burns’.

The final result was a dark, lumpy comet-like nucleus with active gas jets where the dry ice is exposed at the surface, replicating at a much smaller scale the type of activity that real comets experience as they warm up on their approach to the Sun.

Experts from the Rosetta mission were on hand to answer questions. From left to right: Gerhard Schwehm (former mission manager and project scientist for Rosetta, and project scientist for ESA’s Giotto mission to Comet Halley in 1986), Emily Baldwin (ESA’s space science editor) and Fred Jansen (Rosetta mission manager).

Here, the capital city of Portugal, Lisbon, is shown with south at the top of the image. The brightest area is the city centre. The two bridges connecting the capital to the south – Ponte Vasco da Gama and Ponte 25 de Abril – show up as two straight lines crossing the black Rio Tejo. The peninsular city of Peniche shows up as a blob of light protruding into the Atlantic Ocean at the bottom of the picture.

This image was taken in 2012 using ESA’s Nightpod camera aid that compensates for the motion of the International Space Station. The target stays firmly centred in frame so the final image is in focus. Astronauts can set up the device to take ultra-sharp images automatically using off-the-shelf cameras from 400 km up.

The Arcachon Bay in France’s southwest Aquitaine region is pictured in this image acquired on on 8 September 2009 by Japan’s ALOS observation satellite. At the centre of the image, we can see the large Dune of Pyla as an elongated light-brown rectangle. This large, sandy dune is about 2.7 km long, 500 m wide and about 110 m tall. In the upper right portion of the image is Arcachon Bay, home to oyster beds and farms.  

ALOS was supported as a Third Party Mission, which means that ESA used its multi-mission ground systems to acquire, process, distribute and archive data from the satellite to its user community. In April 2011 the satellite abruptly lost power while mapping Japan’s tsunami-hit coastline.

This image is featured on the Earth from Space video programme.

This image, not unlike a pointillist painting, shows the star-studded centre of the Milky Way towards the constellation of Sagittarius. The crowded centre of our galaxy contains numerous complex and mysterious objects that are usually hidden at optical wavelengths by clouds of dust — but many are visible here in these infrared observations from Hubble.

However, the most famous cosmic object in this image still remains invisible: the monster at our galaxy’s heart called Sagittarius A*. Astronomers have observed stars spinning around this supermassive black hole (located right in the centre of the image), and the black hole consuming clouds of dust as it affects its environment with its enormous gravitational pull.

Infrared observations can pierce through thick obscuring material to reveal information that is usually hidden to the optical observer. This is the best infrared image of this region ever taken with Hubble, and uses infrared archive data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, taken in September 2011. It was posted to Flickr by Gabriel Brammer, a fellow at the European Southern Observatory based in Chile. He is also an ESO photo ambassador.

In the S1B integration building at the launch site in Kourou.

For more information http://blogs.esa.int/gaia/

The shadow of Saturn cuts across the rings in this recent Cassini image. As the ring particles enter Saturn's shadow, their temperature drops to even colder temperatures, only to warm back up again when they re-emerge into the sunlight. Ring scientists think that these temperature swings may help change the physical properties of the ring particles.

Eight stars are visible in this image, including one through the rings.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 56 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible violet light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 29, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 639,000 miles (1.0 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 128 degrees. Image scale is 4 miles (6 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

More than 8 500 visitors attended the ESTEC Open Day on Sunday 6 October 2013. Under a sunny sky, visitors were free to explore ESA's largest establishment, meet astronauts and talk to space scientists and engineers. Exhibitions and attractions were located across the sprawling site.