User Consultation Meeting on Harmony: watch the replay

Follow the discussions on Harmony – the candidate mission for ESA’s tenth Earth Explorer

As excitement mounts for the unveiling of Webb’s first full-colour images on Tuesday 12 July, here’s how to participate in the global celebration via ESA’s channels. Choose from watching a livestream, attending an in-person event, or joining our social media activities.

With air temperatures in excess of 10°C above the average for the time of year in parts of Europe, the United States and Asia, June 2022 has gone down as a record breaker. The fear is that these extreme early-season heatwaves are a taste of what could soon be the norm as climate change continues to take hold. For those in cities, the heat dissipates slower creating ‘urban heat islands’, which make everyday life even more of a struggle.

An instrument, carried on the International Space Station, has captured the recent land-surface temperature extremes for

ESA’s Navigation Directorate – already the design architect of the Galileo satellite navigation system, Europe’s largest satellite constellation – is reaching out to European industry as it plans the development and in-orbit validation of future ‘positioning, navigation and timing’ (PNT) missions into novel orbits.

In a complex role-played version of a mission to the Moon, controllers at ESOC combined with a team of geological scientists and ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter to oversee a rover’s collection of rock samples. Acting as if he were in lunar orbit, the astronaut was in fact based in a hotel room in Catania, Sicily, with the rover 23 km away and 2 600 m uphill on the volcanic flanks of Mount Etna. As Thomas commanded the rover to pick up rocks his hand experienced just what the robot’s gripper felt – an added dimension in remote

Manchester UK (SPX) Jul 06, 2022
The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration has announced the discovery of three new exotic particles. Exotic particles, such as these, had only been theorised but not observed until recently. These exotic particles are built out of quarks. "Like proton or neutrons, the particles that make up the nucleus of the atom, these new particles are made up of quarks", explained Chris Par

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 01, 2022
A 15-year study led by the Carnegie Institution for Science details the origins and diversity of every known mineral on Earth, a landmark body of work that will help reconstruct the history of life on Earth, guide the search for new minerals and ore deposits, predict possible characteristics of future life, and aid the search for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life. In twin papers

Moffett Field CA (SPX) Jul 06, 2022
Even before the summer's hottest, driest weather has arrived, wildfires have taken a heavy toll in some parts of the U.S. This spring, in collaboration with fire response teams, NASA researchers tested their prototype tools to help make the demanding job of wildland firefighters safer. One element of the solution developed by NASA's Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operat

Santa Barbara CA (SPX) Jul 06, 2022
It may seem like technology advances year after year, as if by magic. But behind every incremental improvement and breakthrough revolution is a team of scientists and engineers hard at work. UC Santa Barbara Professor Ben Mazin is developing precision optical sensors for telescopes and observatories. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, he and his team improved the spectra reso

Washington DC (UPI) Jul 5, 2021
The CAPSTONE orbiter left the low Earth orbit on its way to the moon, NASA said in a statement. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment is attached to Rocket Lab's Photon upper stage, which maneuvered CAPSTONE into position for its journey to the moon. The Photon engine gradually increased its orbit over six days to 810,000 miles