Europe’s newest rocket, Ariane 6, took flight for the second time from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 13:24 local time on 6 March (16:24 GMT, 17:24 CET). This was the first commercial flight for Ariane 6, flight VA263, delivering the CSO-3 satellite to orbit. Arianespace was the operator and launch service provider for the French Procurement agency (DGA) and France’s space agency CNES on behalf of the French Air and Space Force’s Space Command (CDE).

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Albania’s capital Tirana and its surroundings.

At MWC25 Barcelona, the European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled a funding initiative, promoted in partnership with GSMA Foundry, to support projects aimed at integrating satellite and terrestrial networks for seamless connectivity.

Week in images: 03-07 March 2025

Discover our week through the lens

Image: Webb wows with incredible detail in star-forming system

It's a long way to Mars, and explorers headed there will either have to take enough food and supplies to last the whole trip or use in-situ resources to make what they need. A recent ESA Discovery project led by the Universitat de València explored whether microalgae extracted from lichen could survive on Mars and be used to produce oxygen, food and other useful substances.

To kick off this year’s ESA Academy Experiments programme, five university student teams from across Europe were invited to visit the experimental test facilities at ESTEC – ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands – and Novespace, France.

Tokyo (AFP) Mar 4, 2025
Japanese startup ispace on Tuesday set a June 6 target touchdown date for its Moon lander, following the success of its rocket "rideshare" buddy, a spacecraft from a US firm. ispace's unmanned Resilience lander was launched in January on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket together with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost - which aced its lunar landing on Sunday. Blue Ghost is only the second private

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 04, 2025
The Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) experiment has successfully arrived on the lunar surface, where it will operate for one full lunar day-equivalent to 14 Earth days-conducting research on how lunar dust adheres to various materials under the Moon's harsh environmental conditions. "Sunday morning marked a defining moment in both our company's journey and the future of commercial

Boston MA (SPX) Mar 05, 2025
When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop - "zookeeper" featured prominently for a while - but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist. When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents' Chicago home recently, it fel