News

The Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) mission’s second Imager satellite has delivered its first images, showing weather patterns over Europe and Africa.

The Prometheus firing tests validated both the upgraded test bench and a new way of producing the engine’s combustion chamber.

The European Space Agency’s Hera mission for planetary defence has acquired its first close-up of the Didymos binary asteroid system. NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted the smaller Dimorphos asteroid on 26 September 2022 – but this image gives a novel view of its adjacent parent asteroid.

New evidence from gas seeping above volcanic rifts suggests Mars is not geologically dead deep inside, but merely sleeping.

Following a short period in storage after arriving at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, the MetOp Second Generation-B1 satellite has been transferred to a cleanroom and removed from its transport container.

Despite it being a complex operation, ERMIS-3, an 8U CubeSat developed by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, has established a link with an optical ground station marking an important step in validating optical communications on small satellites. The demonstration, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and achieved using optical terminals developed by Lithuanian company Astrolight, happened only weeks after the satellite’s commissioning.

The NASA/ESA Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescopes recently stared at an eerie star-forming scene within the Carina Nebula, a massive gas and dust cloud located approximately 7500 light-years away from Earth. The two telescopes offer complementary views of the shadowy form, nicknamed the Cat’s Head Nebula, which reflects the 'magical' process of star formation. Hubble’s visible-light view shows the cat as a dark, elongated dust pillar and hints of young forming stars, while Webb’s infrared-light imagery unveils many stars and other hidden details.

The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft for planetary defence has resolved its two target asteroids separately for the very first time, revealing the binary nature of the Didymos system, currently some 197 million km away from Earth.

The European Space Agency Council has approved the appointment of two new directors: Andrzej Banasiak as Director of Commercialisation and Industry Partnership, and Nicolaus Hanowski as Director of Space Operations.

With its solar arrays integrated and key qualification reviews under way, Europe’s new ice-monitoring satellite, CRISTAL, is moving from assembly into the demanding testing phase that will demonstrate its readiness for the rigours of launch and life in orbit.

ESA Member States advanced key strategic priorities for Europe’s space ambitions, with discussions spanning space exploration, ESA-EU relations and preparations for upcoming ministerial meetings.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has discovered its first previously unknown comet, in images taken between 16 and 24 September 2026.

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is set to launch into space on a H3 rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center at 04:41 JST on 20 October 2026 (20:41 BST / 21:41 CEST on 19 October 2026). MMX will be the first mission to collect a sample from Mars’s moon Phobos and bring it back to Earth. MMX is led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the French space agency (CNES), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Every September, for one week, the airwaves above the Arctic island of Andøya, Norway, become some of the most heavily attacked in the world. For a good reason: Jammertest. From the small village of Bleik, 69 degrees north, Norwegian authorities launch hundreds of jamming and spoofing attacks, allowing participants to test their technologies against realistic threats, identify weaknesses in them and ultimately develop stronger positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions.

Just two weeks after it was launched, the Copernicus Sentinel-3C satellite returned its first images and measurements from two of its key instruments.

The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has flown through an S-shaped kink known as a ‘switchback’ in the solar wind’s magnetic field. By fingerprinting the elusive particles within the switchback, Solar Orbiter has traced its origin back to the Sun’s surface and revealed more about solar magnetism – the unruly instigator of dangerous solar storms.

Scientists using the European Space Agency's Mars Express, in combination with a state-of-the-art meteorological model of the Red Planet, have found that there may be some very exotic physics behind Mars’s most curious cloud.

A new tool allows for more sustainable spacecraft and rocket design. The Assessment and Comparison Tool (ACT) offers engineers sustainability as a key metric throughout their space mission’s design. The project was funded by the European Space Agency with EPFL Space Center in Switzerland leading a consortium of companies. ACT is now commercialised, maintained and being improved by the project’s spinoff company EcoDeltaV.

ESA’s Themis reusable rocket stage demonstrator successfully completed its second ‘wet dress rehearsal’ at Esrange Space Center in Sweden on 29 September, testing the vehicle and ground procedures under representative cryogenic conditions.

A research aircraft chased a sub-orbital rocket launch in Sweden to see how space agencies can better monitor and understand emissions in our atmosphere.