Copernical Team
Under crushing hypergravity, fruit flies adapt—and recover
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Week in images: 27 April - 01 May 2026
Week in images: 27 April - 01 May 2026
Discover our week through the lens
Earth from Space: Netherlands in bloom
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Captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 21 April 2026, this image shows a double bloom in the Netherlands: an array of vibrant colours in the tulip fields as well as the blue-greenish swirls of phytoplankton in the North Sea. Sentinel-1D goes live: a milestone for Europe’s radar mission
The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite, launched last November, is now fully operational after successfully completing its critical in-orbit commissioning phase.
With all four Sentinel-1 satellites having now been deployed, this achievement marks a major milestone for this flagship radar mission – a journey that began more than a decade ago and that has helped pave the way for the future of Earth observation.
This Month at ESA: April 2026
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What did space deliver for Europe this month? From the Moon to low Earth orbit and beyond, here’s what the European Space Agency has been up to.
What would happen without satellite communications?
The sudden loss of satellite communications would lead to widespread disruption, affecting vital services such as air travel, maritime logistics and emergency response with an estimated economic impact of up to €20 billion. To highlight the economic importance of satellite-enabled connectivity, London Economics prepared a report for the European Space Agency (ESA), examining the effects of a hypothetical week-long outage of satellite communications across ESA Member States and Canada.
Starry spiral in a familiar neighbourhood
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Starry spiral in a familiar neighbourhood Baking a parachute for Mars
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Watch ESA’s Mars chief engineer Albert Haldemann explain the sterilisation process of one of the parachutes of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission and why it matters.
Carefully wrapped inside a donut-shaped bag is a 35-m diameter parachute, about to be baked inside a specialised dry-heat steriliser oven. The parachute needs to be at least 10 000 times cleaner than your smartphone.
To get rid of any microbes it might have picked up during its time on Earth, the parachute was heated up in a specialised oven at the European Space Agency’s Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical centre in the Netherlands. All air inside the cleanroom continuously passes through a two-stage
The great parachute bake-out
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The great parachute bake-out Another one: Ariane 6 flies with four boosters once more
