Tag Archives: ESA

You’re looking at NGC 346, a star cluster 210 light years away that is energetically pumping out brand new stars from a dense cloud of gas and dust. Between 10 and 11 billion years ago, nearly all galaxies in the Universe underwent an era of intense star formation similar to what we see in NGC 346. This flurry of stellar ...

A Vega C rocket on its launch pad in French Guiana with the Pléiades Neo Earth-imaging satellites inside the payload fairing. Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/S. Martin Two Pléiades Neo Earth observation satellites are set to join Airbus’s constellation of high-resolution optical imagers with a launch Tuesday night from French Guiana on the first commercial flight of Europe’s Vega C rocket, a mission ...

Illustration of the Vega C rocket with its Zefiro 40 second stage firing. Credit: Arianespace The final two spacecraft in Airbus’s four-satellite, 600 million-euro commercial Pléiades Neo Earth observation fleet crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after launch from French Guiana Tuesday night, falling victim to a failure of a European Vega C rocket. The Vega C rocket’s launch operator, ...

A European Ariane 5 rocket blasts off from Kourou, French Guiana, on Tuesday with Europe’s MTG-I1 weather satellite and Intelsat’s Galaxy 35 and 36 communications satellites. Credit: ESA–M. Pedoussaut A European Ariane 5 rocket fired off a launching stand Tuesday in tropical South America with the vanguard of a modernized series of weather satellites to improve storm forecasts for Europe, ...

Black holes are gluttonous behemoths that lurk in the center of galaxies. Almost everybody knows that nothing can escape them, not even light. So when anything made of simple matter gets too close, whether a planet, a star or a gas cloud, it’s doomed. But the black hole doesn’t eat it at once. It plays with its food like a ...

Our galaxy’s stellar halo is giving astronomers some new food for thought. It turns out everyone thought the halo was spherical. But, it’s not. That’s news to everyone who said it was spherical. According to a new measurement done by a team at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it has a tilted, oblong football shape. This all tells astronomers an interesting ...

Creating astronomical images is no easy task, and astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have provided a handy guide to show you how astronomy goes from raw data to an image that you can splash on your desktop. The journey starts with the detector itself. In the case of the VLT Survey Telescope located at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal ...

A prototype of ESA’s new heavy lift rocket is now fully assembled and sitting on the launchpad at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. But according to officials at a briefing last week, the space agency and the rocket’s prime contractor, ArianeGroup, have decided to delay the first flight of the Ariane 6 to the fourth quarter of 2023 after several ...

That’s no moon … wait … yes, it is, and more! ESA’s Mars Express has captured an unusual and rare occultation, all from its vantage point in orbit of Mars.  The spacecraft’s orbit brought it to the right place where it could witness the moment Mars’ small moon Deimos passed in front of Jupiter and its four largest moons. Scientists ...

A European Ariane 5 rocket lifts off from Kourou, French Guiana, with the Eutelsat Konnect VHTS broadband satellite. Credit: Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/P. Piron A powerful Eutelsat commercial communications satellite launched Wednesday aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana, heading into orbit on a mission expected to last more than 15 years to provide broadband connectivity to rural households, ships, and ...