Nearly 90% of Mars’ surface has been mapped by the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express, which celebrates ten years since launch this June.
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The latest Mars image mosaic as seen through the lens of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express. The mosaic comprises 2702 individual swaths of the martian surface, up to and including the …
I’ve updated The Sky This Month page with this month’s Moon information along with videos about what’s up in the sky in February and other items of interest that can bee seen this month. … Read the rest of this article
Call it a Saturnian version of the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that bites its own tail. In a new paper that provides the most detail yet about the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA’s Cassini mission describe how the massive storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered … Read the rest of this article
Setting up a lunar base could be made much simpler by using a 3D printer to build it from local materials. Industrial partners including renowned architects Foster + Partners have joined with ESA to test the feasibility of 3D printing using lunar soil.
“Terrestrial 3D printing technology has produced entire structures,” said Laurent Pambaguian, heading the project for ESA.
A star thought to have passed the age at which it can form planets may, in fact, be creating new worlds. The disk of material surrounding the surprising star called TW Hydrae may be massive enough to make even more planets than we have in our own solar system.
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This artist’s concept illustrates an icy planet-forming disk around a young …
ESA’s Venus Express has made unique observations of Venus during a period of reduced solar wind pressure, discovering that the planet’s ionosphere balloons out like a comet’s tail on its nightside.
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The change in ionosphere of Venus during normal solar wind conditions (left) and reduced solar wind activity (right), as observed by ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft in August 2010. The …
In this new view of the Andromeda galaxy from ESA’s Herschel space observatory, cool lanes of forming stars are revealed in the finest detail yet.
Andromeda, also known as M31, is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way at a distance of 2.5 million light-years, making it an ideal natural laboratory to study star formation and galaxy evolution.… Read the rest of this article
In this 6th session of the internet-based live lectures between Universities and Institutes, Dr Jorge Vago (ESA) discusses missions to Mars and in particular the European mission ExoMars.
ExoMars’s scientific objectives are:
1) To search for signs of past and present life;
2) To identify surface hazards to future human Mars missions; and
3) To characterise, in the shallow subsurface, … Read the rest of this article
This is a press release from Chris Lewicki, the President and Chief Asteroid Miner at Planetary Resources:
In the accompanying video, you can see one of our full scale Arkyd-100 mechanical prototypes. The Arkyd-100 is our space telescope and technology demonstrator for our Arkyd Series prospecting missions.
One of the earliest decisions we made was to design and build … Read the rest of this article
The European Space Agency wanted to know the level of knowledge about the number of planets in our Solar System so they asked people around Europe. It’s not very encouraging…
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
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