Category: News

Week in images: 05-09 May 2025

Discover our week through the lens

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Part of the Italian island of Sardinia is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

For the first time, two spacecraft in orbit were aligned in formation with millimetre precision and maintained their relative position for several hours without any control from the ground.

The activities to assemble the European Space Agency’s Plato mission are progressing well now that 24 of the spacecraft’s 26 cameras have been installed. Once in space, Plato will use its many eyes to survey a very large area of the sky and hunt for terrestrial planets. The spacecraft’s supporting element is also coming together in parallel.

Thanks largely to Copernicus Sentinel-1, scientists have discovered that a glacier in Antarctica is rapidly siphoning ice from neighbouring flows – at a pace never before seen. Until now, researchers believed that this process of ‘ice piracy’ in Antarctica took hundreds or even thousands of years, but these latest findings clearly demonstrate that this isn’t always the case.

Fresh from the cleanroom in Bremen, Germany, the second of the Meteosat Third Generation satellites and the first instrument for the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission have arrived at Cape Canaveral harbour, in the US.

Just a week after its launch, ESA’s Biomass mission has reached another critical milestone on its path to delivering unprecedented insights into the world’s forests and their vital role in Earth’s carbon cycle – the satellite’s 12-metre-diameter antenna is now fully deployed.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher emphasises the importance of cooperation in space activities

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00:03:23

Astrophysicist and Nobel Prize Laureate Didier Queloz answers the who, what, where, when and why of exoplanets in this 3-part series. 

As the new Biomass satellite settles into life in orbit following its launch on 29 April, ESA has released its most extensive satellite-based maps of above-ground forest carbon to date. Spanning nearly two decades, the dataset offers the clearest global picture yet of how forest carbon stocks have changed over time.

Developed through ESA’s Climate Change Initiative, this new long-term record integrates data from multiple satellite missions – and will soon be further enhanced by data from the Biomass mission itself.

Week in images: 28 April – 02 May 2025

Discover our week through the lens

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The Ocean and Land Colour Instrument on Copernicus Sentinel-3 captured this image of Earth’s biggest iceberg, A23a, on 5 April 2025.

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00:02:59

ESA’s state-of-the-art Biomass satellite launched aboard a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket lifted off on 29 April 2025 at 11:15 CEST (06:15 local time).

In orbit, this latest Earth Explorer mission will provide vital insights into the health and dynamics of the world’s forests, revealing how they are changing over time and, critically, enhancing our understanding of their role in the global carbon cycle. It is the first satellite to carry a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar for interferometric imaging. Thanks to the long wavelength of P-band, around 70 cm, the radar signal can slice through the whole forest layer to measure the ‘biomass’, meaning the woody trunks, branches and stems, which is where trees store most of their carbon.

Vega-C is the evolution of the Vega family of rockets and delivers increased performance, greater payload volume and improved competitiveness.

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