The latest guardian of our oceans has taken its place in orbit. The Copernicus Sentinel-6B satellite is now circling Earth, ready to continue a decades-long mission to track the height of the planet’s seas – a key measure of climate change.
Tag: image
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Mapping Dark Matter
This image shows two massive galaxy clusters. The vast number of galaxies and foreground stars in the image were captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light. Glowing, hot X-rays captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory appear in pink. The blue represents the dark matter, which was precisely mapped by researchers with Webb’s detailed imaging.
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A solar prominence hovers over the Sun
Video:
00:00:22The Sun is always mesmerising to watch, but Solar Orbiter captured a special treat on camera: a dark ‘prominence’ sticking out from the side of the Sun.
The dark-looking material is dense plasma (charged gas) trapped by the Sun’s complex magnetic field. It looks dark because it is cooler than its surroundings, being around 10 000 °C compared to the surrounding million-degree plasma.
When viewed against the background of space, the hovering plasma is referred to as a prominence. When viewed against the Sun’s surface, it is called a filament. (In this image you can see examples of both.)
Solar prominences and filaments extend for tens of thousands of kilometres, several times the diameter of Earth. They can last days or even months. This video shows one hour of footage, sped up to make movement more clearly visible.
Solar Orbiter recorded this video with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on 17 March 2025. At the time, the spacecraft was around 63 million km from the Sun, similar to planet Mercury.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. The EUI instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB).
[Video description: Close-up video of the Sun, filling the left half of the view, its surface covered what looks like moving, glowing hairs accompanied by some short-lived bright arcs. Protruding to the right, in the centre of the video, is dark material that looks almost feathery, with thin streaks flowing both away from and towards the Sun.]
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Week in images: 10-14 November 2025
Week in images: 10-14 November 2025
Discover our week through the lens
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ESA pinpoints 3I/ATLAS’s path with data from Mars
Since comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object, was discovered on 1 July 2025, astronomers worldwide have worked to predict its trajectory. ESA has now improved the comet’s predicted location by a factor of 10, thanks to the innovative use of observation data from our ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft orbiting Mars.
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Earth from Space: Prague
Image:
This very high-resolution image captures the beautiful medieval core of the Czech capital, Prague. -
A Robotic Helping Hand
The 57.7-foot-long Canadarm2 robotic arm extends from a data grapple fixture on the International Space Station’s Harmony module in this July 23, 2025, image.
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Brazil gears up to harness ESA’s Biomass data
As the COP30 climate conference gets underway in Brazil, the world’s attention is once again drawn to the plight of the Amazon – the planet’s largest and most vital rainforest. With the European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer Biomass satellite now in orbit, ESA is helping Brazil prepare to transform this new mission’s groundbreaking data into actionable knowledge for protecting the rainforest and confronting climate change.
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First confirmed sighting of explosive burst on nearby star
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory and the LOFAR telescope have definitively spotted an explosive burst of material thrown out into space by another star – a burst powerful enough to strip away the atmosphere of any unlucky planet in its path.
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What a martian ice age left behind
Travelling up from Mars’s equator towards its north pole, we find Coloe Fossae: a set of intriguing scratches within a region marked by deep valleys, speckled craters, and signs of an ancient ice age.
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Celebrating 30 years of European satellite navigation
Video:
00:03:42The year 2025 marked three decades of satellite navigation in Europe. To celebrate this milestone, on 2 September, the European Space Agency (ESA) opened the doors of ESTEC, its research and technology centre. Partners from across the continent joined a sensational event that took the audience on a journey through time, honouring the achievements and collaboration that have shaped the success story of the systems we rely on today: Galileo and EGNOS.
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John McFall | Prosthetics, Possibility & Parabolic Flights | ESA Explores #16
Video:
00:12:53Meet John McFall – Paralympian, medical doctor and member of ESA’s Astronaut Reserve. As part of ESA’s groundbreaking FLY initiative, John is helping prove that physical disability is no barrier to space. In this episode, he shares the results of a feasibility study showing no technical showstoppers for flying to the International Space Station with a prosthesis and talks about what’s next—from hardware certification and scientific proposals to astronaut reserve training and running in microgravity.
In this miniseries, we take you on a journey through the ESA Astronaut Reserve, diving into the first part of their Astronaut Reserve Training (ART) at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) near Cologne, Germany. Our “ARTists” are immersing themselves in everything from ESA and the International Space Station programme to the European space industry and institutions. They’re gaining hands-on experience in technical skills like spacecraft systems and robotics, alongside human behaviour, scientific lessons, scuba diving and survival training.
ESA’s Astronaut Reserve Training programme is all about building Europe’s next generation of space explorers—preparing them for the opportunities of future missions in Earth orbit and beyond.
This interview was recorded in February 2025.
You can listen to this episode on all major podcast platforms.
Keep exploring with ESA Explores!
