An official launch date has been set for the long-planned BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The joint ESA/JAXA deep space probe will lift off atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the ESA Spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana on October 18, 2018.
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A huge lake of liquid water has been found on Mars. The groundbreaking discovery marks the first time a significant amount of the life-giving liquid has been detected. Discovered through satellite radar readings, the lake lies beneath the ice caps at the south pole of Mars.
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Even though ESA's ExoMars 2020 rover is due to launch in only two years, the robotic explorer is still lacking a name. To remedy this, astronaut Tim Peake announced today at the Farnborough International Airshow that the UK Space Agency is starting a public competition to find a suitable moniker.
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ESA is gearing up to test on one of the largest solid rocket motors ever built this week. At the space agency's Spaceport in French Guiana, the first complete P120C rocket motor will be mounted on a static test stand where 600 sensors will monitor the motor during its 135-second burn.
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ESA is working on a new robotic rover to retrieve containers of Martian rock and soil left behind by NASA's Mars 2020 rover. ESA has now awarded the initial £3.9 million (US$5.2 million) contract to design the new Fetch rover to Airbus, which will undertake the study in Stevenage, England.
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If astronauts are ever going to return to the Moon, they must come to terms with the lunar environment. To combat a major threat to astronaut health and technology, ESA is conducting a major study of moon dust to determine how dangerous it is and how to counter its effects on humans and machines.
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An international team of astronomers has now found evidence of a celestial smash-up between the Milky Way and an unknown dwarf galaxy that took place around eight to 10 billion years ago, and forever changed the face of our home galaxy.
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‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar visitor ever detected passing through our Solar System, and while it was originally classed as an asteroid after its discovery, astronomers have now updated the label. ‘Oumuamua, it turns out, is a comet after all, but it’s unlike any other known comet.
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Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the most promising places in the Solar System to look for extraterrestrial life. Now Cassini mission data has shown the presence of complex organic molecules, spraying up from the moon’s subsurface ocean through cracks in the icy shell.
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ESA wants to send its unmanned Hera orbiter to the Didymos binary asteroids to assess the effects of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which is designed to test the feasibility of deflecting potentially dangerous asteroids away from the Earth.
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