esa

A Mega-Merger of Massive Galaxies Caught in the Act

May 22, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Even though the spacecraft has exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant necessary to observe the infrared energy of the distant Universe, data collected by ESA’s Herschel space observatory are still helping unravel cosmic mysteries — such as how early elliptical [...]

Read the full article →

ESA’s Vega Rocket Launches Three Satellites to Space

May 7, 2013

The second flight of ESA’s newest launch vehicle has successfully sent three different satellites to space. Launching at 02:06 GMT on 7 May from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, the Vega rocket carried two Earth observation satellites — ESA’s Proba-V, Vietnam’s VNREDSat-1A — and Estonia’s first satellite, the ESTCube-1 technology demonstrator were released into [...]

Read the full article →

ATV-4 Albert Einstein Says ‘Fill ‘er Up!’

April 16, 2013

The next European cargo mission to the International Space Station is preparing for launch, and in this new image, a fuelling operator at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana inspects the ATV-4 Albert Einstein as it is filled with propellant. Launch is currently scheduled for June 5, 2013 on an Ariane 5ES rocket to bring about [...]

Read the full article →

Terran Fleet at Mars Takes a Break for Conjunction – Enjoy the Video and Parting View

April 6, 2013

Earth’s science invasion fleet at Mars is taking a break from speaking with their handlers back on Earth. Why ? Because as happens every 26 months, the sun has gotten directly in the way of Mars and Earth. Earth, Mars and the Sun are lined up in nearly a straight line. The geometry is normal [...]

Read the full article →

Meet Hopper: A Key Player in the Planck Discovery Story

March 22, 2013

Behind every modern tale of cosmological discovery is the supercomputer that made it possible. Such was the case with the announcement yesterday from the European Space Agencies’ Planck mission team which raised the age estimate for the universe to 13.82 billion years and tweaked the parameters for the amounts dark matter, dark energy and plain old [...]

Read the full article →