ESA

ESA's next-generation Ariane 6 heavy rocket came another step closer to flight on November 23, 2023 as it completed a long-duration hot-fire test of the stacked booster's Vulcain 2.1 engine at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

The European Space Agency (ESA), Airbus Defence and Space, and Voyager Space have signed a technology agreement that gives us a glimpse at space exploration and exploitation beyond the retirement of the International Space Station (ISS).

ESA has released the first five images from its Euclid space telescope that reveal unprecedented high-resolution pictures that cover large areas of the sky in a single shot, demonstrating its capabilities for its upcoming dark matter survey.

In anticipation of a photographic bonanza, NASA and ESA are testing the new Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC), which will be carried by future astronauts to record their adventures in images and video when they return to the Moon in a few years.

NASA’s InSight listened out for seismic activity on Mars, and last year it picked up a marsquake so big it was suspected to be a meteoroid impact. Now, thanks to the cooperation of all agencies with orbiters around Mars, the source has been tracked.

The Moon is a dusty place, so to tidy things up a bit, ESA is experimenting with high-energy lasers and simulated lunar soil to explore the possibility of sintering lunar regolith to pave roads and landing fields for future lunar outposts.

Hiding within new images of a nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have made a puzzling discovery – dozens of Jupiter-sized objects that defy explanation.

Imperial College is developing a rocket thruster called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster) that is so small that it can only be fabricated using techniques originally designed for making silicon chips.

Solar wind – charged particles from the Sun – pervades our solar system, but the exact mechanism behind it remains murky. Now ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has observed previously unknown tiny flares on the Sun’s surface spewing plasma into space.

In a scary first, scientists have discovered a 2021 solar eruption so large that it was, for the first time, detected simultaneously on Earth, the Moon, and Mars, highlighting the radiation dangers posed by such events to deep space travelers.

In an historic experiment, ESA has made a controlled reentry of its Atmospheric Dynamics Mission-Aeolus (ADM-Aeolus) satellite in a maneuver designed to reduce the risk of such end-of-life events creating space debris or fragments reaching the ground.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has scored another first, detecting evidence of water in a planet-forming disc circling another star where at least two terrestrial-class proto-planets seem to be forming.