The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft caught a massive whiff of methane from orbit, confirming an earlier gas detection on the Red Planet by America's Curiosity rover. Signs of the hydrocarbon molecule rouses excitement because there is a possibility that it may be produced by biological processes, and therefore …

Britain's Reaction Engines has been given the greenlight to press ahead with an ambitious testing programme for its SABRE air-breathing rocket engine. The European Space Agency (ESA) and the UK Space Agency (UKSA) took a look at the preliminary design for the engine core of the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) …

NASA and the European Space Agency have teamed up to attempt to answer what seems like an impossible question: what is the mass of the Milky Way? The topic has been bugging scientists for a while, and it's a useful figure to know because it's needed in simulations of galaxies and of our galaxy within the universe. Previous …

With a mere 58 days remaining until Brexit, the UK government has published a cheerful insight into the "size and health" of Blighty's space industry. While the UK lacks domestic launch capability, it is responsible for many of the instruments and systems used in spacecraft and launchers. The report (PDF), which looked at the …

PicWithin the next six years, the European Space Agency hopes to drill into the Moon and extract oxygen and water, paving the way for folks to eventually live on the rocky satellite. The ESA this week signed a one-year contract with ArianeGroup, an aerospace biz specializing in space rides and ballistic missiles, to bring the …

Spacewalking cosmonauts clambered outside the ISS yesterday to get an external view of the mystery hole drilled into the Soyuz, which is due to return three crew members to Earth next week. Roscosmos flight engineers Oleg Kononenko (fresh from his launch aboard Soyuz MS-11 earlier this month) and Sergey Prokopyev popped open …

RoundupThis week Rocket Labs launched six satellites into the nether, the British team on ESA's ExoMars mission had a think about where to land their rover on the red planet in 2021, and Japan helped successfully scrap a load of space crap. Rocket Labs declares that it is indeed Business Time as Electron flings sats into orbit The …

A year-long round trip to Mars could give you more than half the maximum radiation dose recommended for an astronaut's entire career, according to data collected by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The spacecraft, weighing in at over 4,000 kilograms (8,801lb), was launched by the European Space Agency and its Russian counterpart …

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 …