esa Archives

May 17, 2023May 17, 2023 by Matt Williams

Life Probably Didn't Have a Hand in Creating Organic Deposits on the Surface of Mars

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter analyses the martian atmosphere. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

At this very moment, eleven robotic missions are exploring Mars, a combination of orbiters, landers, rovers, and one aerial vehicle (the Ingenuity helicopter). Like their predecessors, these missions are studying Mars’ atmosphere, surface, and subsurface to learn more about its past and evolution, including how it went from a once warmer and wetter environment to the freezing, dusty, and extremely dry planet we see today. In addition, these missions are looking for evidence of past life on Mars and perhaps learning if and where it might still exist today.

One particularly interesting issue is how the atmosphere of Mars – primarily composed of carbon dioxide (CO₂) – is relatively enriched with Carbon-13 (¹³C), aka. “heavy carbon.” For years, scientists have speculated that the ratio of this isotope to “light carbon” (¹²C) might be responsible for organics found on the surface (a sign of biological processes!). But after analyzing data from the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) mission, an international team led by The Open University determined that these organics may be “abiotic” in origin (i.e., not biological).

May 16, 2023May 16, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

Hurray! Juice Deploys its Stuck Antenna

One of the stuck parts of Juice's RIME antenna deploys. Credit: ESA/Juice mission.

ESA’s Juice mission launched last month on April 14, beginning its long journey to explore Jupiter’s icy moons, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. But soon after launch, mission controllers realized a 16-meter (52.5 ft)-long antenna for a radar instrument was jammed and couldn’t deploy. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna is mission critical, as it gathers data for the instrument that will be able to map beneath the ice at these moons.

But, whew, the story has a happy ending. After nearly a month of efforts to free the stuck antenna, engineers figured out a fix for the RIME antenna. They fired a mechanical device in the jammed bracket, which created enough jiggling and rattling to allow the antenna to fully deploy.

May 15, 2023May 15, 2023 by Andy Tomaswick

ESA Wants Your Ideas for Living off the Land… on the Moon

Challenges have been a mainstay of space exploration for several years at this point. In the past, they have ranged from making a potential space elevator to designing a solar power system on the Moon. The European Space Agency is continuing that tradition and has recently released a new challenge focusing on lunar resources. Called the Identifying Challenges along the Lunar ISRU Value Chain campaign, this new ESA platform is the next step in the agency’s efforts to develop an entire “value chain” of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies.

May 8, 2023May 8, 2023 by Matt Williams

LISA Will Be a Remarkable Gravitational-Wave Observatory. But There’s a Way to Make it 100 Times More Powerful

Artist's impression of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Credit: ESA

The first-time detection of Gravitational Waves (GW) by researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015 triggered a revolution in astronomy. This phenomenon consists of ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of massive objects and was predicted a century prior by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In the coming years, this burgeoning field will advance considerably thanks to the introduction of next-generation observatories, like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA).

With greater sensitivity, astronomers will be able to trace GW events back to their source and use them to probe the interiors of exotic objects and the laws of physics. As part of their Voyage 2050 planning cycle, the European Space Agency (ESA) is considering mission themes that could be ready by 2050 – including GW astronomy. In a recent paper, researchers from the ESA’s Mission Analysis Section and the University of Glasgow presented a new concept that would build on LISA – known as LISAmax. As they report, this observatory could potentially improve GW sensitivity by two orders of magnitude.

April 18, 2023April 18, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Juice Looks Back at Earth During Its Space Odyssey to Jupiter’s Moons

Juice view of Earth — The Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden are prominent in this Earth snapshot from the JMC1 camera on the European Space Agency's Juice probe, captured a half-hour after launch on April 14. Credit: ESA / Juice / JMC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

As the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft headed out on an eight-year trip to Jupiter’s icy moons, it turned back to snap some selfies with Earth in the background — and those awesome shots are just the start.

The bus-sized probe is due to make four slingshot flybys of Earth and Venus to pick up some gravity-assisted boosts to its destination — and ESA mission managers plan to have the monitoring cameras running during those close encounters.

April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 by Matt Williams

Perseverance is Turning Into That Friend That's Always Picking Up Rocks

This image shows the rock core from “Berea” inside inside the drill of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

On Thursday, March 30th, NASA’s Perseverance rover drilled and stored the first rock core sample of its newest science campaign. This is the sixteenth sample the rover has taken as part of the ambitious Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, a collaborative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to retrieve Perseverance’s samples and bring them back to Earth. Once they arrive (expected to happen by 2033), scientists will analyze them using state-of-the-art machinery too heavy and cumbersome to send to Mars as part of a robotic mission.

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023 by Matt Williams

Moons Orbiting Rogue Planets Could be Habitable

An artist's conception of a potentially-habitable exomoon. It seems reasonable that exoplanets have exomoons, and now we're going to look for them. Credit: NASA

When looking for signs of life beyond the Solar System, astrobiologists are confined to looking for life as we understand it. For the most part, that means looking for rocky planets that orbit within their star’s circumsolar habitable zone (HZ), the distance at which liquid water can exist on its surface. In the coming years, next-generation telescopes and instruments will allow astronomers to characterize exoplanet atmospheres like never before. When that happens, they will look for the chemical signatures we associate with life, like nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia.

However, astrobiologists have theorized that life could exist in the outer Solar System beneath the surfaces of icy moons like Europa, Callisto, Titan, and other “Ocean Worlds.” Because of this, there is no shortage of astrobiologists who think that the search for extraterrestrial life should include exomoons, including those that orbit free-floating planets (FFPs). In a recent study, researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) determined the necessary properties that allow moons orbiting FFPs to retain enough liquid water to support life.

March 16, 2023March 16, 2023 by Evan Gough

ExoMars is Back on Track for Mars in 2028

An artist's illustration of the ExoMars/Rosalind Franklin rover on Mars. Image Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

The ExoMars Rover mission is back on track for its mission to Mars, but Russia won’t be a part of it this time. Following Russia’s disastrous invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022, the ESA suspended the ExoMars program.

Now, the mission is targeted for a 2028 launch to Mars without Russian involvement. In anticipation of that launch date, the ESA is busy testing the Rosalind Franklin rover and its mission-defining drill.

March 3, 2023March 3, 2023 by David Dickinson

ESA’s Solar Orbiter Spies a Transit of Mercury

Solar Orbiter’s unique vantage point recently allowed researchers to make a crucial observation of the solar system’s innermost world.

You never know when a chance for some extra space science will present itself. Recently, European Space Agency (ESA) mission controllers had just such a chance, when the planet Mercury passed in front of our host star as seen from the Solar Orbiter’s point of view in space.

February 25, 2023February 25, 2023 by Matt Williams

Astronomers Suspected There Should Be a Planet Here, and Then They Took a Picture of it

Direct images of AF Lep b, acquired by the SPHERE instrument on the VLT. Credit: ESO/Paranal Observatory

To date, astronomers have confirmed 5,272 exoplanets in 3,943 systems using a variety of detection methods. Of these, 1,834 are Neptune-like, 1,636 are gas giants (Jupiter-sized or larger), 1,602 are rocky planets several times the size and mass of Earth (Super-Earths), and 195 have been Earth-like. With so many exoplanets available for study (and next-generation instruments optimized for the task), the process is shifting from discovery to characterization. And discoveries, which are happening regularly, are providing teasers of what astronomers will likely see in the near future.

For example, two international teams of astronomers independently discovered a gas giant several times the mass of Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star about 87.5 light-years from Earth. In a series of new papers that appeared in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the teams report the detection of a Super-Jupiter orbiting AF Leporis (AF Lep b) using a combination of astrometry and direct imaging. The images they acquired using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) have since become the ESO’s Picture of the Week.