The European Space Agency’s terrestrial planet hunter Plato has recently completed a series of key tests inside the Maxwell Test Chamber at ESTEC, demonstrating that its electronic equipment is fit to work in space.

This photo captures the spacecraft standing inside the special chamber. The shielded enclosure features conducting metal walls, floor, and ceiling that form a Faraday cage, screening out all external interference. Its 9 m-high interior is lined floor to ceiling with foam spikes that absorb electrical signals and sounds to mimic the void of space.

Once the chamber was sealed closed, engineers remotely switched on and

Press Release N° 35–2026

Media representatives are invited to express their interest in attending the media programme at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana for the launch of the FLEX and Copernicus Sentinel-3C satellites on a Vega-C rocket (flight VV30). Liftoff is expected to take place in September.

From 22-26 June, 30 university students from Europe and Canada came together at the European Space Agency (ESA) Academy’s Training and Learning Facility in Belgium to explore the fundamentals of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). The course prepared the next generation of navigation professionals with lectures from experts and hands-on exercises where students applied their new knowledge.

The four Artemis II astronauts visited ESTEC, ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands, on 13 July as the first stop in a series of post-flight visits to the European teams that made their mission possible.

The day included a visit to the Eagle mission control room, where ESA and Airbus engineers monitored the European Service Module around the clock throughout Artemis II. There, astronauts met some of the ESA specialists who had supported their flight from Earth.

From 22-26 June 2026, 30 university students from Europe and Canada came together at the European Space Agency (ESA) Academy’s Training and Learning Facility in Belgium to explore the fundamentals of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). This annual course prepares the next generation of navigation professionals with lectures from experts and hands-on exercises where students can apply their new knowledge. In this video, students and lecturers from the 2026 edition of the training course talk about the importance of satellite navigation, including Europe’s Galileo system, in their own words. 

Week in images: 13-17 July 2026

Discover our week through the lens