Researchers at the Technische Universität Wien in Austria have found that solar wind can do far more than project lights in the Earth's night sky. The work, published in the journal Icarus, found that while we on Earth are treated to displays such as the Northern Lights, bodies that lack the Earth's protective magnetic field, …

A team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center gathered last week to bid farewell to a mass spectrometer as it began its journey to the red planet via an assembly plant in Italy. The instrument is a key component of a toaster oven-sized lab, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA), which will detect evidence of …

The newly launched Sentinel-3B satellite has snapped its first shots of home, delighting boffins back on Earth. The latest addition to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus programme was launched on 25 April from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome and successfully placed in orbit. Less than two weeks later, scientists have got …

The European Space Agency is looking to build a communications satellite to send data securely using quantum key distribution. On Thursday, it signed a contract with SES Techcom S.A, a satellite communications company based in Luxembourg, to develop QUARTZ (Quantum Cryptography Telecommunication System). Quantum entanglement …

There was good news and bad news for interplanetary exploration today. The bad news is that the heat shield for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover has cracked. Thankfully, it hasn't even taken off let alone attempted to land on Earth's sister world. The good news is that NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have signed an agreement …

The European Space Agency (ESA) has emitted a huge dump of data from its Gaia mission to 3D map the Milky Way. Wednesday's mega-release, containing high precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars, dwarfs the first release of data in 2016, which pinned down the position of 1.14 billion stars and the distances and motion …

The European Space Agency (ESA) is all a-quiver at the prospect of the second Sentinel-3 satellite launch, due this evening atop a Russian Rockot launcher. The spacecraft will ride to space at 1757 UTC on 25 April from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia aboard an elderly converted Intercontinental Ballistic Missile ( …

The European Space Agency is launching a new research project to study satellite collisions in space. “We want to understand what happens when two satellites collide,” said Tiziana Cardone, an ESA structural engineer leading the project, on Tuesday. “Up until now a lot of assumptions have been made about how the very high …

A Guidance and Navigation Control (GNC) issue scuppered last night's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9. Conversely, the European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated a successful restart of the Mars Express orbiter following a software update. TESS is less Scheduled for launch yesterday, the …

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter is getting a software refresh as a reward for 14 years spent circling the red planet. Mars Express arrived in orbit at the end of 2003, and set about collecting high-resolution imagery of the surface, spotting water and detecting methane. Not too shabby for a spacecraft …

The European Space Agency (ESA) claimed today that the first test of the giant parachute destined for use by the ExoMars lander has been a success, paving the way for more ambitious trials before an eventual attempt on the Red Planet itself. The 195kg parachute assembly was lofted to 1.2km above Kiruna, Sweden, before being …

The European Space Agency is launching a mission to find out how planets form and how life emerges in space, it announced on Tuesday. Ariel, also known as the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey mission, will narrow down on the search for exoplanets and is expected to launch in 2028. Other spacecraft …

Cornwall has thrown its hat in the ring to become the prime location for Human Centred Space businesses by 2030. The UK Space Agency is deciding where to splash £50m to build British spaceports. Spaceports are intended to help Blighty access a global market for launching small satellites worth £10bn over 10 years, and offer …

The European Space Agency's INTEGRAL space observatory has captured an unusual piece of stellar voodoo: the moment when a dead star was brought back to life by a nearby red giant. The slowly rotating core of the zombie star was revived by x-ray flares from its engorged neighbour, giving rise to a high energy emission from the …

The European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is to conduct its final aerobraking manoeuvre this evening prior to starting its mission of sniffing for Martian methane. TGO should finally settle into its proper orbit tonight, 400km above the red planet. It was launched nearly two years ago aboard a Russian Proton …

Satellite outfit ViaSat is forming a €68m (£60m) public-private partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), which among other things is intended to fund ground stations for home broadband speeds of 100Mbps. The programme will focus on developing fixed and mobile terminals to allow its ViaSat-3 satellites to provide a …

On July 3rd, 2016 something unusual happened on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko: a fountain of dust erupted out of a hole and spewed all sorts of stuff into space. As luck would have it, Earth's Rosetta probe had five instruments trained on the fountain as it started to blow. Better yet, the probe flew through the plume of …

The European Space Agency (ESA) has been able to squeeze one last photo out of the Rosetta probe. Rosetta crash-landed onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in September 2016 and the ESA revealed the last image it captured. That snap was thought to have been taken from an altitude of about 50m, but the agency now thinks it was …