Tag: ESA

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Friday the 13th of April 2029 will be our lucky day.

Apophis, a 375-metre-wide asteroid, will safely pass Earth at a distance of less than 32 000 kilometres. For a few hours, Apophis will be closer than satellites in geostationary orbit and visible to the naked eye from Europe and Africa.

Space agencies have sent a number of spacecraft to asteroids, but we have never had a mission at an asteroid as it sweeps past a planet. This grand natural experiment offers a unique opportunity to study in real time how an asteroid responds to a strong external force – and the European Space Agency aims to have a front-row seat.

To this end, ESA’s Space Safety Programme has proposed the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses). If approved, Ramses would launch a year ahead of the Apophis flyby, travelling through space to rendezvous with the asteroid months before its encounter with Earth.

Ramses would use a suite of scientific instruments to measure Apophis’s size, shape, composition, rotation and trajectory as it is pulled and stretched by Earth’s gravity. It wouldalso deploy two smaller spacecraft at the asteroid to study Apophis up-close.

Apophis poses no danger to Earth during the flyby, but an asteroid of this size passes thisclose to our planet only once every roughly seven thousand years. By seizing this exceptionally rare opportunity to study an asteroid before, during, and after a planetary encounter, Ramses would help us prepare for the day that we may need to deflect a hazardous object on a collision course with Earth.

A cornerstone of the Planetary Defence segment of ESA’s Space Safety Programme, Ramses would demonstrate Europe’s ability to rapidly design, launch and operate a mission to an asteroid of high importance.

When the world looks up to see Apophis passing overhead, Ramses could be flying alongside, uncovering the secrets of the Solar System’s ancient building blocks, and helping us learn how to protect our planet from any that come too close for comfort.

Using 11 years of magnetic field measurements from the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellite constellation, scientists have discovered that the weak region in Earth’s magnetic field over the South Atlantic – known as the South Atlantic Anomaly – has expanded by an area nearly half the size of continental Europe since 2014.

Week in images: 06-10 October 2025

Discover our week through the lens

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This wide view of Copernicus Sentinel-3 shows Cyclone Errol heading towards the coast of Western Australia.

By fitting its sunshield and solar panels, engineers have completed the construction of Plato, the European Space Agency’s mission to discover Earth-like exoplanets. Plato is on track for the final key tests to confirm that it is fit for launch.

During recent storms, satellites recorded ocean waves averaging nearly 20 metres high – as tall as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and the largest ever measured from space. Moreover, satellite data now reveal that ocean swells act as storm ‘messengers’: even though a storm may never make landfall, its swell can travel vast distances and bring destructive energy to distant coastlines.

The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission is about to get its fourth satellite. Copernicus Sentinel-1D has now undergone the checks and functional tests prior to its integration with Ariane 6, ready for launch on Tuesday, 4 November 2025.

Between 1 and 7 October, ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express spacecraft turned their eyes towards interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, as it passed close to Mars. 

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What a difference a year makes! Today Hera’s asteroid mission for planetary defence is cruising through deep space on the far side of the Sun, headed to its final destination: the Didymos binary asteroid system. But a year ago, on 7 October 2024, it was unsure if the mission was ever going to take off at all.

Its launcher was grounded due to a launch anomaly and Hurricane Milton was closing on Cape Canaveral! The mission needed to lift off then and there because it had to perform a flyby of Mars to speed it on its way to Didymos. Any delay would add years to its travel time. But Hera received permission for launch and the heavens cleared just half an hour before launch. Liftoff happened to plan – the team had their mission in space!

Since then Hera has been testing out the ‘self-driving’ technology it will use around the asteroids on Earth and the Moon, performed its flyby of Mars and imaged its very first asteroid from three million kilometres, proving the capability of its main Asteroid Framing Camera. Next Hera is heading for aphelion, its furthest distance from the Sun. It will reach Didymos in autumn 2026, after which it will begin its mission to find out what happened to the smaller asteroid after NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted it in September 2022.

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Satellite navigation is essential to everything from tracking your morning jog to landing air ambulances. But as reliance on satellite navigation grows, so do the risks associated with its interruption, natural or intentional. In its pursuit of strengthening European resilience in navigation, the European Space Agency (ESA) took part in Jammertest.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has expanded its capability to communicate with scientific, exploration and space safety missions across our Solar System with the inauguration of a new 35-m diameter deep space antenna – the fourth for Estrack, ESA’s deep space tracking network.

Week in images: 29 September – 3 October 2025

Discover our week through the lens