Content tagged "ESA".
8 items (8 articles, 0 stories)
ESA floats volunteers in water covered by a waterproof sheet for days at a time, deliberately recreating how astronauts' bodies decline in orbit. Stripped of support, bones and muscles start wasting and fluid rushes to the head. The data from these tanks is becoming the blueprint for getting long-term bedridden patients back on their feet.
In 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos and shifted its orbit by 32 minutes — 25 times more than the mission needed to call itself a success. Nobody can fully explain why it worked that well. Four years later, ESA's Hera probe is heading to the scene to measure the damage and find out.
As Earth crosses the Sun's face, it dims the Sun's light by only 0.008%. ESA's PLATO exoplanet telescope, targeting a 2027 launch, will watch over 200,000 stars for years hoping to catch that same fleeting shadow. SORABUMI explains why hunting for a second Earth is such a patient game.
ESA's Comet Interceptor will launch before its target comet has even been discovered, parking in space to wait. A mothership and two probes will approach a comet that has never before neared the sun, or possibly an interstellar visitor, from multiple directions at once. SORABUMI explains this unusual mission.
On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will skim past Earth at just 32,000 km — closer than geostationary satellites. During this once-in-10,000-year flyby, Earth's gravity will physically reshape the rock in real time. ESA and JAXA's Ramses mission will be there to document it.
In 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos and changed its orbit — the first time humanity had ever deflected a space rock. Now ESA's Hera mission is heading there to examine the aftermath. Here's how far planetary defense has come.
BepiColombo, the joint ESA–JAXA mission launched in 2018, will finally enter Mercury's orbit in November 2026. Why does the journey take so long, and what makes Mercury such a puzzling world?
Discovered in 2025, 3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object ever detected. How do we know it came from outside the solar system? What makes it different from ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov? And why did ESA and NASA scramble to observe it so quickly? Here's what the data is telling us — and what it might unlock about planet formation across the galaxy.