Image: Spacesuit design: Flavio Gentile

Video: 00:04:20

ESA’s Euclid space telescope is nearly ready for launch. The spacecraft arrived in Florida on 30 April for final tests and checks, and now being integrated with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will carry it into space.

For the team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, this means that the most intense phase of their work is about to begin. To prepare themselves, the team has simulated the launch operations, tackling issues ranging from team members falling ill to a computer mouse being taped over.

Euclid is ESA’s space telescope designed to explore the

China has delivered a set of satellites to Egypt as part of a program to develop the latter country's capacity to assemble, integrate and test satellites.

Washington (AFP) June 29, 2023
Virgin Galactic is set Thursday to finally begin commercial spaceflights, a major milestone for the company founded in 2004 by British billionaire Richard Branson. Its first paying customers are a three-member crew from the Italian Air Force and National Research Council of Italy, with a fourth seat occupied by a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor. Dubbed Galactic 01, the 90-minute mis

Washington DC (UPI) Jun 28, 2023
A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is set to depart from the International Space Station Thursday to deliver NASA experiments and samples dating back as far as six years. The spacecraft is scheduled to depart from the ISS's Harmony module at about 12:05 p.m EDT Thursday under the command of ground controllers in Hawthorne, Calif. NASA will provide live coverage of the Dragon's depa

Paris (AFP) June 29, 2023
Europe's Euclid space telescope is scheduled to blast off Saturday on the first-ever mission aiming to shed light on two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. The launch is planned from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 11:11 am local time (1511 GMT) on a Falcon 9 rocket of the US company SpaceX. The European Space Agency was forced to turn to the rival firm of bi

Toronto, Canada (AFP) June 29, 2023
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, urged governments on Wednesday to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society. Hinton made headlines in May when he announced that he quit Google after a decade of work to speak more freely on the dangers of AI, shortly after the release of ChatGPT captured the imagination of the world. Th

An exciting initiative based at ESA’s facility in the UK will give student researchers the opportunity to quickly investigate key challenges associated with space exploration.

Dutch firm ISISPACE has manufactured more than 600 cereal-box sized ‘CubeSat’ satellites, plus nearly 200 deployment systems used to release them into orbit. Of all of these, the pair of Deep Space Deployers it has overseen for ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence have been by far the most challenging. The two systems need to keep their nanosatellite cargo alive and healthy, before releasing them on a precisely staged basis – at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second. Any faster and Hera’s CubeSats would risk getting lost in space.