So far, 2017 hasn’t exactly been a great year, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find the world is still filled with wonderful things. In August, eight children living with disabilities were given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience zero gravity. Before watching, you’ll probably want to reach for a tissue.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Galileo satellites have been having a bad time for the past 17 years. Now, the 10 billion euro project has suffered what might be its strangest setback yet: Nine clocks across the 18 Galileo satellites in orbit have suddenly stopped working. For a fleet that was supposed to create an…
Landing on Mars is hard, but the European Space Agency’s first attempt—the Beagle 2 probe—came maddeningly close to being a success. In fact, a new 3D modeling analysis shows that the lander’s failure to communicate with the Earth was likely due to a single jammed solar panel.
A joint mission led by the European Space Agency and Roscosmos arrives at Mars next week, and its first order of business will be to make history. If all goes well, NASA is about to lose its bragging rights as the only space agency to successfully land probes on the Red Planet.
After two years of science, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission ended today in a gentle crash-landing. But if you haven’t been tracking this spacecraft’s movements as obsessively as we have, you might be wracking your brain this morning trying to remember what the Rosetta mission was.
The Rosetta spacecraft has spent three years peering at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from orbit—but this week, its watch will end. Tomorrow, Rosetta begins a controlled descent to its final resting place on the edge of an enormous pit, where it’ll remain frozen until the space rock itself is destroyed, or until the…
In just seven days, the Rosetta spacecraft will smash into Comet 67P. A new visualization shows how it’ll go down.
Some may call it excessive, unreasonable, exhibitionist. What kind of masochist wants to stare at a billion pinpricks of light all at once, anyway? Why, the scientifically inclined one, of course. The astronomer who’s hellbent on picking apart the universe and reducing your life to a clump of dust needs absurdly…
In two weeks, the European Space Agency will crash-land its prized Rosetta spacecraft, marking a dramatic end to the whirlwind two-year science mission that saw humanity’s first-ever comet landing. It’ll be 48 action-packed hours as Rosetta descends to its ultimate resting place on Comet 67P—and to get you properly…
With only a few days left before it’s scheduled to crash-land on the surface of Comet 67P, the Rosetta spacecraft is still yielding amazing discoveries. And I’m not just talking about lost comet landers.
In October, the joint ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars 2016 mission will land the Schiaparelli rover on the Red Planet. Here’s where the probe is scheduled to land, and why researchers chose this particular area.
Set yourself a reminder for September 30—that’s when the Rosetta spacecraft will make a controlled descent and crash on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After 12 years in space and nearly two years circling around this dusty, weirdly-shaped comet, this historic mission is finally coming to an end.
There’s no shortage of footage showing what life aboard the International Space Station is like, but unless you’ve had a chance to spend some time there, the ISS’ sprawling and ever-expanding layout can be confusing. To help make better sense of it, the European Space Agency has created a narrated video tour of the…
Scientists have long debated the possibility that some of the key ingredients for life on Earth were brought to our newly-formed planet by comets and asteroids. A new discovery in the “fuzzy atmosphere” of Rosetta’s comet may lend some credence to this theory.
Luckily for Sentinel-3a, there’s no bags to pack, no TSA, and expensive satellites only fly first class.
These are the vast plains of Katwijk. That’s not the name of a new Martian valley or a hidden lunar crater, though but... a beach, right here on Earth in the Netherlands. In fact, it’s where the European Space Agency is putting a new breed of robotic rovers through their paces.
It was one year ago today that the Philae Lander bounced, spun, and tumbled across the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. To commemorate the historic event, the European Space Agency has released an animated video chronicling the lander’s chaotic landing.
This looks like it could the latest rover to land on the surface of Mars. But in fact it’s a test of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission happening right here on Earth.
The entrance to the European Space Agency’s ESRIN Earth observation centre near Rome in Italy just got a little brighter, thanks to the French artist known as Invader.
This latest image from the Hubble Space Telescope is utterly stunning: it’s of the Quintuplet Cluster, named for its five brightest stars. Up until 1990, we had no idea that this existed: because it’s so close to the center of the galaxy, dust has blocked our view of it.
