At Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, preparations for one of the year’s most anticipated Earth-observation launches are entering their final stages.

FLEX and Copernicus Sentinel-3C have now been enclosed within the protective fairing of their Vega-C rocket, bringing the two satellites one step closer to their shared journey into space.

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir successfully completed US EVA-99 at 21:29 CEST on Tuesday 1 September. It was Sophie’s third spacewalk, and the 33rd conducted by a European astronaut.   

The Cluster mission danced its final dance as Tango reentered the atmosphere on 1 September, at 23:30:31 CEST. The end of the Cluster mission in 2024 turned into the start of the reentry data collection campaign. After four ‘targeted’ reentries, this is now a proven method of safe end-of-life disposal. It also enabled the repeated observation of the reentries by a plane full of scientists, creating a unique reentry data set that will improve our understanding of the destructive process and can inform the design of safer and more sustainable satellites in the future.

Yesterday evening, during a signing ceremony at the Space for Inspiration event in Copenhagen, Denmark, the European Space Agency (ESA) and ispace-Europe celebrated the implementation of MAGPIE, set to be the first European rover on the Moon.

Using cutting-edge technology, ESA’s FLEX mission is designed to reveal new insights into how plants function by measuring the faint fluorescence they emit when they capture light during photosynthesis. Although invisible to the human eye, this signal changes with environmental conditions and plant health – allowing scientists to assess vegetation health, and stress. The FLEX satellite is equipped with the Fluorescence Imaging Spectrometer (FLORIS), an instrument designed specifically to detect and map this delicate glow from space.

Encrypting messages from space by taking advantage of the laws of quantum physics is the next step towards secure communications. A core technology enabling this capability has now been qualified for QKDSat, a European Space Agency (ESA) Partnership Project with Honeywell Aerospace, in collaboration with satellite prime contractor Redwire Europe. The mission will demonstrate secure pre-operational satellite-based Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) services.

Yesterday, on 31 August 2026, Samba reentered Earth’s atmosphere at 21:39:38 UTC / 23:39:38 CEST as the third of the four Cluster satellites. Samba had been lined up for a special 'targeted reentry' safely over the South Pacific Ocean, the precision so high that a plane could fly out from Tonga and successfully record its demise for reentry science.

After two successful spacewalks on 18 August (EVA-97) and 25 August (EVA-98), watch ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot venture into the vacuum of space for the third time on Tuesday 1 September, during EVA-99.

Rewatch the European Space Agency's 31 August 2026 online press briefing on the latest developments of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission, Europe's and Japan's first mission to Mercury.

This briefing focused on the complexities of the separation of the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), scheduled for 3 September 2026, a critical milestone marking the start of BepiColombo’s Mercury arrival phase. It also provided an overview of the operational challenges and milestones ahead, including Mercury orbit insertion in November 2026 and the separation of the two science orbiters (ESA's MPO and JAXA's Mio) in December 2026.

The briefing also provided an update