Scenes from the combined hot-fire test held for Ariane 6 on 23 November 2023. Teams on the ground went through a complete launch countdown followed by a seven-minute full firing of the core stage’s engine, as it would fire on a launch into space.

This video shows the Ariane 6 mobile building opening its doors, the building rolling away to leave the Ariane 6 test model on the launch pad and the seven minutes of firing.

On the launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, the Ariane 6 test model fired of its Vulcain 2.1 main stage engine for seven

In around six months, ESA’s Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer mission will take to the skies to advance our understanding of the interactions between clouds, aerosols and radiation in Earth’s atmosphere. But how will it do that exactly?

Focus on Euclid with Guadalupe Cañas Herrera: “I’m exactly where I’ve always wanted to be.”

Guadalupe Cañas Herrera, an ESA Internal Research Fellow currently working for ESA’s Euclid mission at ESTEC, the Netherlands, describes in this interview her personal and professional trajectory.

Passionate about space since her early childhood, she has spent endless nights looking at the stars. Now, this theoretical physicist develops her activities within the Euclid Scientific Consortium to establish the quantity of dark matter and dark energy existing in the Universe.

Listen to Guadalupe for a vivid account from a vocational scientist and an ardent defender of

ESA is helping to unlock next-generation space connectivity to support communication everywhere and anywhere through the advancement of a new software platform from Aalyria, an innovative young company.

There are 28 small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) working on ESA’s Hera planetary defence mission, which involves about 100 companies in total. These SMEs are building European cutting-edge technologies for the spacecraft, its instruments and two CubeSats.