Boston MA (SPX) Sep 16, 2022
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing the universe with spectacular, unprecedented clarity. The observatory's ultrasharp infrared vision has cut through the cosmic dust to illuminate some of the earliest structures in the universe, along with previously obscured stellar nurseries and spinning galaxies lying hundreds of millions of light years away. In addition to seeing far

Boston MA (SPX) Sep 16, 2022
Swirling around the planet's equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted giant rotates at a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune, as Saturn's tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at nearly the same rat

Pasadena CA (JPL) Sep 16, 2022
The latest findings provide greater detail on a region of the Red Planet that has a watery past and is yielding promising samples for the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return campaign. NASA's Perseverance rover is well into its second science campaign, collecting rock-core samples from features within an area long considered by scientists to be a top prospect for finding signs of ancient microbial

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Sep 16, 2022
The CAPSTONE team has received some relatively good news on the recovery progress for the spacecraft. The communications situation has dramatically improved, the power state of the spacecraft appears to be sufficient for continuous (duty cycled) heating of the propulsion system which dropped below its operational temperature. Over the past few days, CAPSTONE's power - though limited by the

Week in images: 12-16 September 2022

Discover our week through the lens

This summer, heatwaves struck Europe, North Africa, the US and Asia with temperatures reaching over 40°C in places – breaking many long-standing records. Images from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission show the scale of Britain’s heatwave as it baked in extreme temperatures in August.

Registration has begun for the ESA Open Day at ESTEC on Saturday 1 October, open to people with disabilities. ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, will be open from 10:00 to 14:00, giving visitors with disabilities the opportunity to tour this leading European space establishment at their own pace. The event will conclude with a talk by ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer.

Washington (AFP) Sept 15, 2022
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has detected its highest concentrations yet of organic molecules, in a potential signal of ancient microbes that scientists are eager to confirm when the rock samples are eventually brought to Earth. While organic matter has been found on the Red Planet before, the new discovery is seen as especially promising because it came from an area where sediment and sal

Video: 01:04:23

On September 27 at 01:14 CEST, NASA’s DART (for ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’) mission is lined up to collide with a body called Dimorphos – a 160-m diameter ‘moonlet’ of a larger asteroid called Didymos – to try and measurably shift its orbit. In this media briefing, hear more about Europe’s contribution to the DART mission, and learn of ESA’s own mission with a close-up survey of Dimorphos, conducted by a spacecraft called HERA. The HERA mission is planned for launch in 2024.