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ESA Top News

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
ESA Top News
ESA Top News

ESA Top News

October 9th, 2024 04:31:00 EDT -0400 Five reasons to join the European Space Agency!
Five reasons to join the European Space Agency

In 2023, ESA published more than 400 vacancies in engineering, science and business and administration and more positions continue to be published as we are always on the lookout for talented new colleagues to join us. So, what does it mean to join ESA? Here are five reasons why you should consider ESA as the next step in your career!

January 17th, 2025 09:20:00 EST -0500 Malargüe: A satellite dish best served cold
Snowy Malargüe

A capacity increase by almost 80%! In late July 2024, the Malargüe deep-space communication station completed an important upgrade of its antenna feed that will allow missions to send much more data back to Earth.

January 17th, 2025 09:10:00 EST -0500 Week in images: 13-17 January 2025
Hubble’s panoramic view of the Andromeda Galaxy

Week in images: 13-17 January 2025

Discover our week through the lens

January 17th, 2025 05:00:00 EST -0500 Seed-sized space chip
Seed-sized space chip Image: Seed-sized space chip
January 17th, 2025 04:00:00 EST -0500 Earth from Space: Frozen borders
This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice. Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice.
January 16th, 2025 14:15:00 EST -0500 Hubble traces hidden history of the Andromeda Galaxy
Hubble’s panoramic view of the Andromeda Galaxy

The largest photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations, unveils hundreds of millions of stars. It took more than 10 years to collect data for this colorful portrait of our neighbouring galaxy and was created from more than 600 snapshots. This stunning, colourful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars, and is spread across roughly 2.5 billion pixels.

January 16th, 2025 03:00:00 EST -0500 EarthCARE goes live with data now available to all
EarthCARE for a better understanding of Earth's radiation balance

With ESA’s EarthCARE satellite and four measuring instruments all working extremely well and fully commissioned, the mission’s ‘first level’ data stream is now freely available.

By combining data from all four instruments, scientists ultimately aim to address a critical Earth science question: how do clouds and aerosols affect the heating and cooling of our atmosphere?

January 15th, 2025 09:00:00 EST -0500 Technological ‘to-do list’ to reach Zero Debris created
The growing problem of space debris

There is an increasing willingness in the space sector to tackle the problem of space debris. Yet much of the required technology to mitigate or prevent its risks is still missing.

Preventing new debris, avoiding collisions and the timely clearance of satellites from orbit at their end-of-mission are complex challenges that each require a variety of practical solutions.

Released to the public on 15 January 2025, the Zero Debris Technical Booklet is a community-driven document that identifies technologies that will contribute to the goal of Zero Debris by 2030. Essentially, the Booklet forms a technical Zero Debris 'to-do list'.

January 15th, 2025 04:00:00 EST -0500 The best Milky Way animation, by Gaia
Video: 00:02:05

This is a new artist’s animation of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.

Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even seemingly simple ideas about the nature of our galaxy’s central bar and the spiral arms have been overturned. Gaia has shown us that it has more than two spiral arms and that they are less prominent than we previously thought. In addition, Gaia has shown that its central bar is more inclined with respect to the Sun.

No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so we can’t take a selfie, but Gaia is giving us the best insight yet of what our home galaxy looks like. Once all of Gaia’s observations collected over the past decade are made available in two upcoming data releases, we can expect an even sharper view of the Milky Way.

Click here to download the still image of the Milky Way.