Washington DC (UPI) Oct 19, 2021
NASA has approved resumption of routine spacewalks outside the International Space Station after a seven-month pause and after finishing an October flight readiness review. The review was the last step in an investigation into a "close call" on a spacewalk in March. Three spacewalks are planned, beginning sometime in mid-November, to work on installation of roll out solar arrays

Paris (ESA) Oct 19, 2022
The Ariane 6 launch pad at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana now hosts for the first time a fully assembled example of ESA's new heavy-lift rocket, following the addition of an upper composite to the core stage and four boosters already in place. The upper composite - consisting of two half-fairings and a payload mock-up with the structural adapter needed to join it to the core stage - made th

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Watch the replay of our Q&A with the media to learn about the outcomes of the 310th session of the ESA Council. Updates are provided on the ambitious package presented by ESA for the 22/23 November ESA Ministerial Meeting in Paris, but also on the further expansion of ESA memberships, the future of ExoMars, Space Transportation and the overall, delicate economic situation.

After months of effort, astronomers have succeeded in capturing the momentary shadow cast by the Didymos asteroid, from tens of million km away as it passed in front of far-distant stars – a feat of observation only made possible when both the trajectory of the asteroid and the precise location of the stars are known. Even in that case, to have a chance of success, several observers had to be placed in meticulously predicted locations across the path of the shadow, to glimpse the fleeting fading of the star within just a fraction of a second.

Astronomers looking into the early Universe have made a surprising discovery using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s spectroscopic capabilities, combined with its infrared sensitivity, have uncovered a cluster of massive galaxies in the process of formation around an extremely red quasar. The result will expand our understanding of how galaxies in the early Universe coalesced into the cosmic web we see today.

Image: Hubble follow-up of DART impact

ESA’s Navigation Directorate is planning a new satellite whose results will enable the generation of an updated global model of Earth – the International Terrestrial Reference Frame, employed for everything from land surveying to measuring sea level rise – with an accuracy down to 1 mm, while tracking ground motion of just 0.1 mm per year. This improvement, at a stroke, will have a major impact in multiple navigation and Earth science applications, including enhancing the precision of the Galileo navigation system. This mission, called GENESIS, is being proposed to ESA’s Council Meeting at Ministerial Level next

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Press briefing on Ariane 6 progress at ESA Bertrand HQ, 19 October 2022: (l-r at front) Stéphane Israël (Arianespace Chief Executive), André-Hubert Roussel (ArianeGroup Chief Executive), Philippe Baptiste (CNES Chairman and Chief Executive), Joseph Aschbacher (ESA Director General), Daniel Neuenschwander (ESA Director of Space Transportation Systems)

Ariane 6, the new heavy-lift launch system being developed by the European Space Agency, will make its inaugural flight as soon as the fourth quarter of 2023. Briefing media gathered at ESA’s Paris Bertrand headquarters on 19 October, Director General Joseph Aschbacher said sufficient progress had been made over the past several months to anticipate a Q4 2023 first flight, pending the realization of three key milestones before April next year.