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Meet Sara García Alonso — biotechnologist, cancer researcher, passionate science communicator and member of ESA’s Astronaut Reserve.

She’s our first guest in this miniseries, where we dive into the journey of the ESA Astronaut Reserve and explore the first part of their Astronaut Reserve Training (ART) at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC). Here, our “ARTists” are learning all about ESA and the International Space Station programme, the European space industry and institutions, and gaining hands-on experience in technical skills like spacecraft systems and robotics, as well as human behaviour, scientific lessons, scuba diving, and survival skills. This interview was recorded in November 2024.

This interview was recorded in November 2024.

Find out more about Sara here and learn about ESA’s Astronaut Reserve Training programme here. 

You can also listen to this episode on all major podcast platforms, including Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer and more.

Explore more from ESA Explores here.

Watch the replay of our Hera mission Mars flyby event. On 12 March 2025, ESA’s Hera mission came to within 5000 km of the surface of the red planet and 300 km of Mars’s more distant and enigmatic moon Deimos. During this flyby, Hera performed observations of both Mars and the city-sized Deimos. Hera then needed to swing its High Gain Antenna back to Earth to transmit its data home. On Thursday, 13 March, these images were premiered by Hera’s science team from ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, explaining what they reveal, during our public webcast starting at 11:50 CET. The team was joined by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and renowned science fiction writer Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, as well as a surprise special guest!

Speakers at the inauguration of ESA Space HPC at ESRIN, Italy. 

Up to several times a day, the Sun blasts bursts of energetic electrons into space, which emit radio waves as they collide with other charged particles. These bursts are picked up by the Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument on the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

A team at Radboud University/Paris Observatory has now divided five years of RPW data into 15 000 six-hour chunks. This video shows one such chunk of data. As the blasted electrons move further into space, away from the Sun, there are fewer charged particles to interact with, and the radio frequency drops. Each ‘hockey stick’ shape is a real radio burst in action.

In this sonification, the radio waves are converted into sound, with lower frequency radio waves corresponding to lower frequency sound waves. Whenever a radio burst occurs, we hear a ‘pyoong’ sound that gets lower in tone before fading out completely. The timeline has been sped up; the biggest radio burst in the middle of the graph lasted about three hours in real life!

On 12 March 2025 ESA’s Hera spacecraft for planetary defence performs a flyby of Mars. The gravity of the red planet shifts the spacecraft’s trajectory towards the Didymos binary asteroid system, shortening its trip by months and saving substantial fuel.

This is a simulation of that flyby, with closest approach to Martian moon Deimos taking place at 12:07 GMT and Mars occurring at 12:51 GMT. It was made using SPICE (Spacecraft, Planet, Instrument, C-matrix, Events) software. Produced by a team at ESA’s ESAC European Space Astronomy Centre, this SPICE visualisation is used to plan instrument acquisitions during Hera’s flyby.

Hera comes to around 5000 km from the surface of Mars during its flyby. It will also image Deimos, the smaller of Mars’s two moons, from a minimum 1000 km away (while venturing as close as 300 km). Hera will also image Mars’s larger moon Phobos as it begins to move away from Mars. In this sped-up simulation, Deimos is seen 30 seconds in, at 12:07 GMT, while the more distant star-like Phobos becomes visible at two minutes in, at 12:49 GMT.

The spacecraft employs three of its instruments over the course of these close encounters, all located together on the ‘Asteroid Deck’ on top of Hera:

Hera’s Asteroid Framing Camera is formed of two redundant 1020x1020 pixel monochromatic visible light cameras, used for both navigation and science.

The Thermal Infrared Imager, supplied by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, images at mid-infrared wavelengths to determine surface temperatures.

Hera’s Hyperscout H is a hyperspectral imager, observing in 25 visible and near-infrared spectral bands to prospect surface minerals.

Did you know this mission has its own AI? You can pose questions to our Hera Space Companion!

On  Wednesday 12 March 2025 ESA’s Hera spacecraft for planetary defence performs a flyby of Mars. The gravity of the red planet shifts the spacecraft’s trajectory towards its final destination of the Didymos binary asteroid system, shortening its trip by months and saving substantial fuel.

Watch the livestream release of images from Hera’s flyby by the mission’s science team on Thursday 13 March, starting at 11:50 CET!

Hera comes to around 5000 km from the surface of Mars during its flyby. It will also image Deimos, the smaller of Mars’s two moons, from a minimum 1000 km away (while venturing as close as 300 km). Hera will also image Mars’s larger moon Phobos as it begins to move away from Mars.

Launched on 7 October 2024, Hera on its way to visit the first asteroid to have had its orbit altered by human action. By gathering close-up data about the Dimorphos asteroid, which was impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft in 2022, Hera will help turn asteroid deflection into a well understood and potentially repeatable technique.

Hera will reach the Didymos asteroid and its Dimorphos moonlet in December 2026. By gathering crucial missing data during its close-up crash scene investigation, Hera will turn the kinetic impact method of asteroid deflection into a well understood technique that could potentially be used for real when needed.

Did you know this mission has its own AI? You can pose questions to our Hera Space Companion!

On 6 March ESA celebrated International Women’s Day with a hybrid event for the whole workforce. The Director General kicked off the event with a welcome message to all the participants highlighting the ESA’s deep commitment to the values of Diversity and Inclusiveness and the many ways the agency is pushing forward the different aspects relevant to gender equality.