ESA

ESA's Mars Express spacecraft has captured a rare movie of the Martian moon Phobos. The moon is set to be the target of an international mission to survey the Red Planet’s two natural satellites, and return a surface sample to Earth.

ESA has commissioned the world's first mission to recover a piece of space debris in orbit. At the end of November, the Ministerial Council consortium awarded a service contract to a consortium for the ClearSpace-1 mission to launch in 2025.

ESA is asking amateur astronomers to help it plan the Hera asteroid mission scheduled to launch in less than five years. The space agency is soliciting data that will allow mission planners to identify candidate asteroids as flyby targets.

On November 18, 2019, from aboard the International Space Station (ISS) 250 mi (400 km) above the Earth, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano took control of the prototype Analog-1 rover for a half-hour spin around its obstacle course in the Netherlands.

ESA is delving into how astronaut hibernation would affect space missions. The study suggests that using hibernation on a Mars mission would reduce the mass of the spacecraft by a third and cut the amount of consumables by about the same amount.

ESA scientists are experimenting with growing blood vessels in the weightlessness of space. Based on the Spheroids experiment on the ISS, researchers found that blood vessel cells organize themselves in a way similar to that of cells inside the body.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a creepy cosmic face emerging from the remnants of colliding galaxies. The gleaming eyes represent the central regions of the dueling galaxies, while other features are formed from their tortured disks.

The Vulcain 2.1 liquid-fueled engine, the rocket that will power the first stage of ESA's Ariane 6 launcher, has passed its qualification tests.

ESA has released a breathtaking mosaic of the Red Planet, stitched together from images taken by the Mars Express spacecraft.

Images returned by the Rosetta mission show dramatic evidence of collapsing cliffs and bouncing boulders on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

ESA plans to launch the first Earth observation satellite incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in a few months.

Water is crucial to life as we know it, so it’s one of the key things astronomers look out for on exoplanets. And now, water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of a potentially habitable exoplanet for the first time.