Braving high winds, dust devils and unpredictable terrain, ESA’s test rover has completed its exploration across – and under – Chile’s Mars-like Atacama Desert. The five-day Sample Acquisition Field Experiment with a Rover, or SAFER, field trial concluded on Saturday 12 October. An early version of ESA’s 2018 ExoMars rover fitted with a trio of … Dowiedz się więcej
Of all ESA establishments, ESTEC is the largest, with around 2700 personnel. This is where ESA missions are conceived then guided through development, and work on new technology is coordinated. When ESTEC was constructed in the early 1960s, foundations 25 metres deep were sunk to ensure sufficient stability for precision engineering tests. Even so, modern … Dowiedz się więcej
Astronomers using ESA’s Integral and XMM-Newton space observatories have caught a fast-spinning ‘millisecond pulsar’ in a crucial evolutionary phase for the first time, as it swings between emitting pulses of X-rays and radio waves. Pulsars are spinning, magnetised neutron stars, the dead cores of massive stars that exploded as a dramatic supernova after having burned … Dowiedz się więcej
ESA astronauts Andreas Mogensen and Thomas Pesquet are in Florida, USA for a five-day underwater adventure to test tools and practise spacewalks as part of the Seatest mission. Andreas will live in an underwater habitat with NASA astronauts Joa Acaba and Kate Rubins and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, while Thomas will stay on shore as … Dowiedz się więcej
ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin waved goodbye to their crewmates as they left the International Space Station yesterday. This signals the end of Expedition 36 and the start of Expedition 37. Cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov together with flight engineers Chris Cassidy and Alexander Misurkin left the station in … Dowiedz się więcej
ESOC 1967: The European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) was founded in 1962. The facility now known as the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) had been established in the autumn of 1963 as the European Space Data Analysis Centre (ESDAC) in Darmstadt, Germany. The facilities initially housed large mainframe computers for the analysis and study of … Dowiedz się więcej