Week in images: 09-13 June 2025
Discover our week through the lens
Tag: ESA
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ESA at Le Bourget 2025 – Day One Highlights
The European Space Agency has begun the 55th International Paris Air Show by unveiling the first images from the Proba-3 spacecraft.
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Earth from Space: East Kalimantan, Borneo
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Copernicus Sentinel-1 captured this image over part of eastern Borneo, a tropical island in Southeast Asia. -
334th ESA Council: Media information session
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01:15:00Watch the replay of the media information session where ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and ESA Council Chair Renato Krpoun (CH) brief journalists on the key decisions made during the ESA Council meeting held at ESA Headquarters in Paris on 11–12 June 2025.
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Join ESA at the International Paris Air Show 2025
Join the European Space Agency at the new Paris Space Hub during this year’s International Paris Air Show.
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Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun’s poles
Thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space weather.
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Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun’s south pole
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00:01:55What if we could look at the Sun from a whole new angle, one we’ve never seen before?
From Earth, we always look towards the Sun’s equator. This year, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission broke free of this ‘standard’ viewpoint by tilting its orbit to 17° – out of the ecliptic plane where the planets and all other Sun-watching spacecraft reside. Now for the first time ever, we can clearly see the Sun’s unexplored poles.
Using different instruments, Solar Orbiter can see what happens throughout the Sun’s outer layers. The material in these layers never stays still, being pushed outward and (usually) falling back to the Sun.
Interestingly, it saw that the Sun’s magnetic field has its north and south all tangled up, with patches of both magnetic polarities present right up to the Sun’s south pole. This only happens once every 11 years, at the point in the solar cycle when the Sun’s magnetic field flips.
Solar Orbiter will keep a close eye on the Sun – including its poles – for the years to come. Its unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space weather.
Read the full story here.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA.
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Ignis mission: Ready for Lift-Off
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00:02:00ESA project astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski is heading to the International Space Station on his first mission as part of Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4). He is the second ESA project astronaut from a new generation of Europeans to fly on a commercial human spaceflight mission with Axiom Space.
Sponsored by the Polish government and supported by ESA, the Polish Ministry of Economic Development and Technology (MRiT), and the Polish Space Agency (POLSA), the mission—called Ignis—features an ambitious technological and scientific programme. It includes several experiments proposed by the Polish space industry and developed in cooperation with ESA, along with additional ESA-led experiments.
Follow Sławosz’s journey on the Ignis mission website and discover more about the next mission patch to be hung on the walls of the Columbus Control Centre.
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Earth from Space: Saharan dust plume
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A thick plume of sand and dust from the Sahara Desert is seen in these satellite images blowing from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic Ocean.
