Tag Archives | ESA

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Nobel Prize laureates call to Space Station

Video: 00:54:35 Station on 6 December 2019. The call was made from Stockholm, Sweden, at the start of Nobel Week festivities. ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang moderated the conversation between two of the Nobel Prize laureates in physics, Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor, and the Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, Stanley Whittingham. To source

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New biomass map to take stock of the world’s carbon

The first of a series of global maps aimed at quantifying change in carbon stored as biomass across the world’s forests and shrublands has been released today by ESA’s Climate Change Initiative at COP25 – the United Nation Climate Change Conference currently taking place in Madrid. To source

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New reentry CubeSat in orbit

Image: ESA’s latest space mission has reached orbit. The Qarman CubeSat flew to space aboard SpaceX’s Dragon launched from Florida, USA, on Thursday 5 December, ahead of a planned rendezvous with the International Space Station on Sunday 8 December. From there, Qarman – seen here during plasma wind tunnel testing – will be deployed into […]

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Mato Grosso, Brazil

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission takes us over part of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso deep in the Amazon interior. This image combines three separate radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission taken about two years apart to show change in crops and land cover over time. Unlike images from satellites carrying optical or […]

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Earth from Space: Mato Grosso

Video: 00:02:33 In this week’s edition of the Earth from Space programme, the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission takes us over part of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso deep in the Amazon interior.See also Mato Grosso, Brazil  to download the image. To source

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Life of a foam

A fine coffee froth does not last forever. The bubbles that make the milk light and creamy are eventually torn apart by the pull of gravity. But there is a place where foams have a more stable life – in the weightless environment of the International Space Station, bubbles don’t burst so quickly and foams […]

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Cheops: Europe's Exoplanet Mission

Video: 00:02:45 ESA’s first mission dedicated to investigating planets outside our solar system is scheduled for launch on a Soyuz rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana on 17 December 2019. Cheops – Characterising ExOPlanet Satellite – will study known exoplanets that are orbiting bright stars. The aim is to obtain detailed information about […]

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35-year data record charts sea-temperature change

Four trillion satellite measurements, taken over four decades from 1981 to 2018, have been merged to create a continuous global record that will help to understand the science behind Earth’s climate. A paper published recently in Nature Scientific Data describes how this new dataset of global sea-surface temperature is one of the longest satellite climate […]

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Sentinel-6 Mission

Video: 00:05:20 In a cleanroom in Ottobrunn, Germany, the latest Copernicus Sentinel satellite is ready for final testing before it is packed up and shipped to the US for liftoff next year. Designed and built to chart changing sea level, it is the first of two identical Sentinel-6 satellites that will be launched consecutively to […]

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ARTEMIS

Thermal enclosure for Orion

Image: The Orion spacecraft with European Service Module at NASA’s Plum Brook Station. The first Orion will fly farther from Earth on the Artemis I mission than any human-rated vehicle has ever flown before – but first it will undergo testing to ensure the spacecraft withstands the extremes of spaceflight. Here at NASA’s Plum Brook […]

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Centre swage

Image: ‘Swage’ was the word of the day on Monday as ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano carried out the third spacewalk to service the cosmic ray hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02. Here Luca is suspended above Earth as he is moved to a second worksite to swage, or join, the instrument’s tubes to a new pump […]

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