ESA

Using resources harvested on location for habitat construction is a vital step in overcoming the prohibitive cost of transporting materials from Earth. Urine, it seems, could be part of the solution.

The coronavirus situation in Europe has forced ESA to temporarily suspend a number of its deep-space missions. To reduce risk to personnel, ESOC is reducing on-site crews and shutting down instruments on eight spacecraft.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a view of a stellar laboratory that is being used to understand how truly gargantuan stars come to form. The image features a colorful starfield and a substructure of the famous Tarantula Nebula.

Europe's ExoMars mission has suffered a setback and will not launch until 2022. The mission has been pushed back from its 2020 launch date due to the need for further component testing and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Organic compounds have been discovered on Mars in recent years. A new study examines the different ways that one type in particular, thiophene, may have formed, and intriguingly one of the most plausible scenarios involves ancient microbial life.

Superyachts and space satellites may not seem like they have much in common, but Royal Huisman's Sea Eagle II – the world’s largest aluminum sailing yacht – was designed using the same engineering techniques that go into developing ESA space missions.

ESA has released a series of maps that let viewers track the amount of permafrost present around the Arctic. Melting of permafrost could add massive amounts of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, worsening the effects of climate change.

Astronomers have found evidence of the most powerful explosion in the universe. The crater of the intergalactic-scale detonation was caused by a supermassive black hole located in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster 390 million light-years from Earth.

Astronomers have spotted a tiny, cool star putting on a stellar light show that would shame our Sun. This X-ray “superflare” was 10 times more powerful than anything the Sun can produce, and is completely unexpected for a star this small.

A spacecraft built to study the Sun in entirely new ways has set sail for the center of the Solar System, with NASA and the ESA confirming the successful launch of the Solar Orbiter mission, which will observe the star's poles for the first time.

Europe's Galileo satellite navigation system can now not only receive, relay, and locate distress beacon signals, it can also respond to the SOS, sending back reassurances to those awaiting rescue in as little as 30 minutes.

Science stands still for no one, and with a new year comes a new calendar of exciting events in spaceflight and exploration. New Atlas rounds up some of the most important milestones to look forward to in 2020.