Press Release N° 33–2021

Le 21 octobre, le Conseil de l’ESA a nommé trois nouveaux directeurs pour la Commercialisation, l’Industrialisation et l’Approvisionnement, pour les Programmes d’Observation de la Terre, et pour la Navigation.

Press Release N° 2–2022

L’accréditation des médias est désormais ouverte pour les activités de lancement et de pré-lancement en lien avec la mission Artemis I de la NASA. Le lancement de la fusée Space Launch System et du vaisseau Orion est prévu pour mars 2022 au plus tôt, depuis le centre spatial Kennedy de la NASA en Floride.

Press Release N° 1–2022

Nous invitons les représentants des médias à participer à notre conférence de presse de début d’année portant sur les évènements clés de 2022. Josef Aschbacher, Directeur général de l’ESA, ainsi que les membres du comité de direction de l’ESA, échangeront avec vous en ligne le 18 janvier 2022.

The first-of-its-kind complement of instruments dubbed the ‘space storm hunter’ hangs out in its new location outside the International Space Station in this image taken by on of the Station’s external cameras.

The Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor, or ASIM for short, measures electric events in Earth’s upper atmosphere with cameras, photometers and X- and gamma-ray detectors. 

Last week ASIM was switched off and moved by robotic arm to another spot outside the Columbus module to make room for an American payload. Now in its new location, the instrument is being activated and so far things are going well.

From its new vantage point, just next to its current one, ASIM is pointing in a different direction, slightly more towards the horizon instead of straight down. This will help researchers work out how much the atmosphere at different altitudes influences the processes of electrical discharges. It’s like viewing a firework display: one can enjoy the shapes more from the side than if one is just below the display!

Though designed to look for electrical discharges born in stormy weather conditions in Earth’s upper atmosphere, ASIM recently detected a unique gamma-ray burst from outer space.

The spurt turned out to be from an explosive giant flare from a magnetar located 10 million light-years away in a distant galaxy. Magnetars are a special type of neutron star – the collapsed core of what was once a supergiant star. This fortuitous observation was published in the December issue of Nature magazine.

ASIM was built by Danish company Terma, the Danish Technical University, the University of Bergen in Norway and the University of Valencia in Spain for the European Space Agency.

It took a crop of potatoes to keep Matt Damon alive on the red planet in The Martian. And in future, real life astronauts on the Moon and Mars will have to be gardeners, farmers and expert recyclers as well as explorers. Do you have promising ideas that might help them to get by in space on next to no resources?

The next stage of ESA’s astronaut selection is underway, with around 1391 applicants invited to a full day of testing at a facility in Europe.