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Watch a replay of the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) post-launch briefing, live from ESA’s European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.
ESA’s Juice mission was launched into space on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 13 April 2023, on an eight-year cruise to Jupiter. It will make detailed observations of gas giant Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
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Ariane 5 VA 260 with Juice ready for launch on the ELA-3 launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on 12 April 2023.
Juice – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. This ambitious mission will characterise Ganymede, Callisto and Europa with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the Universe.
Following launch, Juice will embark on an eight-year journey to Jupiter, arriving in July 2031 with the aid of momentum and direction gained from four gravity-assist fly-bys of the Earth-Moon system, Venus and, twice, Earth.
Flight VA 260 will be the final Ariane 5 flight to carry an ESA mission to space.
ESA space telescopes have observed the brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen. Data from this rare event could become instrumental in understanding the details of the colossal explosions that create gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).
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Explore the fascinating landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover in this fly-through video, featuring new views of Jezero crater and its surroundings from ESA’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The video begins by panning around Jezero crater, which can be seen in the centre background surrounded by textured and cratered terrain. The crater moves into the foreground roughly halfway through, when an outflow channel can be seen snaking away from the crater wall and towards the camera perspective. Two inflow channels (Neretva Vallis and Sava Vallis, found on the western-northwestern rim of Jezero) then become visible; the most prominent of these branches out into the crater to form an ancient fan-shaped river delta that was the landing site for Perseverance.
The Mars Express data come courtesy of the spacecraft’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which has been capturing full-colour, high-resolution snapshots of Mars since 2004 and has mapped over 90% of the planet’s surface. This wealth of information has been essential in the assessment and selection of safe, scientifically useful landing sites on Mars for missions to the planet – including Perseverance, a rover carried to Mars by NASA’s Mars 2020 mission.
Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. The diverse rocks, materials, features and mineralogy found in and around Jezero crater tell the story of Mars’ complex geological history. The roughly 45-km-wide crater is found on the border between the ancient region of Terra Sabaea – which contains rocks of up to 4.1 billion years old – and the younger Isidis Planitia basin, which formed via asteroid impact.
Jezero sits next to an intriguing system of faults known as Nili Fossae and a prominent area of volcanism named Syrtis Major, where lava flowed some three billion years ago.
The wall of Jezero is breached by three valleys that were once rivers of flowing water; the crater is a so-called ‘open basin lake’ in that water once flowed both into and out of the crater, a type of basin that is especially promising in the hunt for life on Mars.
Bringing Mars to Earth
Missions such as Mars Express have made truly significant discoveries about our planetary neighbour from orbit, while lander and rover missions, like ESA’s upcoming Rosalind Franklin rover, give an up-close look at the planetary surface.
However, to dig further into the sophisticated science of Mars, we need to bring samples back to Earth and explore them in laboratories, which are prohibitively expensive, complicated and heavy to send to another planet in their entirety. Sample return missions will be more advanced than any robotic missions that have gone before and will revolutionise our understanding of both the Red Planet and the Solar System.
This video shows the very region of Mars from which we will soon return samples. ESA and NASA are developing the collaborative Mars Sample Return Campaign, on which the Perseverance rover is already hard at work. The rover is caching samples of rock, soil and atmosphere in tubes that will be collected by a follow-up mission in the 2030s. ESA is providing a Sample Transfer Arm that will pick up the tubes and transfer them to a NASA-led rocket for launch into orbit around Mars. ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter will then ‘catch’ the samples and return them to Earth, making it the first interplanetary spacecraft to capture samples in orbit and make a return trip between Earth and Mars.
Read more about ESA’s ambitions for Mars exploration.
More information and a virtual hiking tour through Jezero crater is available from Freie Universität Berlin, whose Planetary Science and Remote Sensing working group created this video.
Creating the video
This video comprises merged data from two instruments: HRSC and CTX. The HRSC data are in the form of the camera’s Mars Chart (HMC30), which provides seamless coverage of imagery and topography across the entire region, and an accompanying digital terrain model, which provided the information needed for the images to be generated in three dimensions. Atmospheric effects – dust, clouds and haze – are added for artistic effect but are not photorealistic, with the haze starting to build up at a distance of 200 km. The CTX data comprise 33 images that have been processed using the HMC30 as a reference for colour and brightness, with a resolution of up to 5 m per pixel. Each second of the movie contains 50 frames. The vertical exaggeration is three-fold.
Video credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin & NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/)
An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted to the Agency’s #SpaceJuice competition in January.
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Carole Mundell is the new Director of Science, succeeding the current director Günther Hasinger.
Professor Mundell is an internationally renowned scientist with extensive experience in inclusive leadership, operational management, strategy and international science policy development.
She joined ESA from the University of Bath where she held the Hiroko Sherwin Chair in Extragalactic Astronomy, was founding Head of Astrophysics, and served as Head of the Department of Physics until becoming the first woman Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2018 and first Chief International Science Envoy in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office until 2021. She was elected President of the UK Science Council in 2021.
Prof. Mundell began her career at the University of Glasgow where she obtained a BSc Double 1st class Hons. in natural philosophy (physics) and astronomy, followed by a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Manchester and postdoctoral research fellowships at Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, and University of Maryland, USA, specialising in the physics of accreting supermassive black holes and their role in galaxy evolution.
Returning to the UK in 1999, Prof. Mundell took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the Liverpool John Moores University, where she was promoted to full professor in 2007. There she founded the Liverpool Gamma-Ray Burst research group, pioneering robotic autonomous technology for real-time follow-up of satellite-discovered high-energy transients. She was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award from 2011-16, a scheme that provides support to recruit or retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential for the UK.
Working at the interface of theory, observation and technology development, Mundell has pushed the frontiers of technology to open new windows on the Universe to test long-standing theoretical predictions in extragalactic astrophysics and probe the black-hole driven, dynamic Universe. She has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers, presented her work to expert and lay audiences around the world and supervised and mentored early-stage career researchers who now hold senior positions in academia and industry.
In 2016, she was named FDM Everywoman in Technology Woman of the Year. In parallel, she has served on a range of national and international strategic, oversight and science funding bodies including the governing Council of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, the European Research Council ‘Universe’ grant panels, the international Science and Engineering Advisory Committee for the Square Kilometre Array and the Board of the Onsala Space Observatory.
Her research interests encompass ground- and space-based research and technology development across the electromagnetic spectrum and new technologies and policies for space sustainability.
Prof. Mundell is a vocal advocate for equity and diversity in science and a sought-after public speaker.
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ESA’s Euclid mission is undergoing the final test before launch in July 2023.
Here it is standing in a special room in the Thales Alenia Space test facilities in Cannes, France, where it successfully underwent electromagnetic compatibility testing.
This kind of testing is routine for spacecraft. All electronics emit some form of electromagnetic waves that can cause interference with other devices. Think of the buzz that speakers give out right before an incoming call on a mobile phone. Spacecraft electronics can cause similar interference, but out in space such interference can have disastrous consequences, so all systems must be checked before launch.
The large test chamber at TAS, called the Compact Antenna Test Range, simulates the electromagnetic environment of deep space, being lined with cones that absorb radio signals and prevent reflections. To avoid TV or radio interference, the walls of the chamber form a steel ‘Faraday cage’, impenetrable to electromagnetic signals from the outside world.
In this radiation-free environment, the team studied the radio signals and electrical noise coming from the various systems on the spacecraft and checked whether they caused any electromagnetic interference with each other.
ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Euclid is a fully European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium – consisting of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan – provided the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its Service Module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the Payload Module, including the telescope. NASA provided the near-infrared detectors of the NISP instrument.
Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope are getting their first look at star formation, gas, and dust in nearby galaxies with unprecedented resolution at infrared wavelengths. The data have enabled an initial collection of 21 research papers which provide new insight into how some of the smallest-scale processes in the Universe — the beginnings of star formation — impact the evolution of the largest objects in our cosmos: galaxies.
Journalists are cordially invited to view Euclid, ESA’s ambitious mission to explore the dark Universe, in Cannes, France, on 21 February 2023.
Media will be given the rare opportunity to see the spacecraft in the cleanroom of Thales Alenia Space (TAS), prior to shipment for its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA in July 2023.
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ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has an ambitious mission ahead. Juice will observe Jupiter and its three largest moons: Callisto, Europa, and in particular Ganymede. The moons’ buried oceans could tell us whether life can arise in different environments across the cosmos. Juice will examine Jupiter and its complex environment to transform our understanding of how the planet works. Its discoveries may also shed new light on solar system evolution, both in our home system and in the diverse array of exoplanet systems beyond our own.
Juice will launch on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It will journey for eight years before starting its complex manoeuvres in the Jupiter system. making 35 flybys of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto before orbiting Ganymede.
This grand odyssey of exploration begins in April 2023.
Stay tuned: www.esa.int/juice
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Webb glimpses field of extragalactic PEARLS, studded with galactic diamonds
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The powerful NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has found an unexpectedly rich ‘undiscovered country’ of early galaxies that has been largely hidden until now.
A few days after officially starting science operations, Webb propelled astronomers into a realm of early galaxies, previously hidden beyond the grasp of all other telescopes. Webb is now unveiling a very rich Universe where the first forming galaxies look remarkably different from the mature galaxies seen around us today.
Researchers have found two exceptionally bright galaxies that existed approximately 300 and 400 million years after the Big Bang. Their extreme brightness is puzzling to astronomers.
The young galaxies are transforming gas into stars as fast as they can and they appear compacted into spherical or disc shapes that are much smaller than our Milky Way galaxy. The onset of stellar birth may have been just 100 million years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Two of the most distant galaxies seen to date are captured in these Webb pictures of the outer regions of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxies are not inside the cluster, but many billions of light-years behind it.
The galaxy featured in the image at the top centre is extracted from the image on the left. It existed only 450 million years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy featured in the image at the bottom centre is extracted from the image on the right. It existed 350 million years after the Big Bang.
Both galaxies are seen really close in time to the Big Bang which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. These galaxies are tiny compared to our Milky Way, being just a few percent of its size, even the unexpectedly elongated galaxy showcased in the top centre image.
More information about this image
Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona. Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
