ESA

ESA has awarded Airbus a €491 million contract to design and build the Earth Return Orbiter, which will return the first samples collected from the Red Planet by NASA's Perseverance rover to Earth.

The joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo probe has successfully completed the first of two scheduled flybys of Venus, gathering data about the planet's dense carbon dioxide atmosphere as it came to within 10,720 km its surface.

ESA's Mars Express has found evidence of more liquid water beneath the ice cap in the south polar region of Mars. Based on data from the MARSIS radar instrument, researchers found three subsurface ponds with the largest measuring 20 x 30 km (12 x 19 mi).

The Cheops exoplanet mission has revealed one of the hottest, most extreme planets orbiting another star. Located 322 light years away in the constellation of Libra, WASP-189 b is an ultra-hot Jupiter with a temperature so high that iron turns to gas.

Data captured by the Cassini spacecraft has been used to create a new infrared map of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The images highlight the icy world's dramatic "Tiger Stripe" vent formation, which leads to a subsurface ocean that could play host to life.

ESA has awarded €129.4 million of funding to the planetary defense mission Hera, which, slated for launch in 2024, will observe the results of humanity’s first attempt to intentionally alter the orbit of a solar system asteroid.

A team of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey has used satellite imagery of penguin poop captured by ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission to calculate there are 20 percent more emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica than previously thought.

A team of ESA scientists has developed a way to use lasers, special telescopes, detectors, and light filters tuned to specific wavelengths to increase contrast with the sky and accurately track space debris even in broad daylight.

We may be a step closer to understanding the mystery of fast radio bursts (FRBs), as astronomers have now detected the first such signal from within our own galaxy. It was traced to a magnetar, which could be key to unlocking the origins of FRBs.

NASA and ESA have announced that the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed to October 2021. A recently-completed schedule risk assessment recommended the delay, due to challenges raised by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

An ESA/NASA spacecraft has captured the closest pictures of the Sun ever taken. The images reveal that our star is covered in relatively tiny flare-like explosions that scientists have dubbed "campfires."

On 12 July 2017, one of the biggest icebergs ever seen broke off from the Antarctic mainland. Now on the third anniversary of the event, satellite data has shown that the berg has traveled over 1,000 km (620 mi) and managed to stay relatively intact