ESA Top Multimedia

On 25 March, the first two satellites of the Celeste in-orbit demonstration mission will lift off aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from the company’s Māhia Launch Complex in New Zealand.

Celeste will play a pioneering role in elevating the future of Europe’s satellite navigation capabilities.

As ESA’s initiative for satellite navigation in low Earth orbit (LEO-PNT), the mission will be testing next-generation technologies and add new frequency bands for satellite navigation to inform the deployment of a future European operational navigation system in low Earth orbit. 

The mission will begin with two demonstrator satellites, IOD1-2, to secure and test the assigned frequency filings and transmit representative navigation signals until the end of the year.

The two satellites consist of two CubeSats (12U and 16U respectively), both developed by two consortia composed by a wide set of European players, one led by GMV (Spain) and the other led by Thales Alenia Space (France).

Learn more about Celeste: https://www.esa.int/Celeste/

Asteroids can strike from any direction, but it is impossible to keep an eye on the entire sky… or is it?

As part of the global effort to detect potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, ESA is developing a series of automated telescopes to scan the sky each night.

The ‘Flyeye’ telescopes take inspiration, and their name, from the large compound eye of an insect, which has evolved over millions of years to detect motion – and therefore potential danger – from almost any direction.

With their unique design, the Flyeye telescopes can capture a region of the night sky that is over 200 times as large as the full Moon in a single image, while maintaining the high image quality needed to detect the motion of even very faint objects.

ESA’s Space Safety programme plans to deploy a network of ‘Flyeye’ telescopes around the world that will work together to carry out nightly sky surveys and automatically identify possible new Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) – especially any that could impact our planet.

These discoveries will be confirmed by astronomers in ESA’s Planetary Defence Office before being submitted to the Minor Planet Center, the global sorting house for asteroid observations. From there, the newly discovered objects will trigger follow-up observations and, if necessary, a planetary defence response.

Click here for the unsubtitled version of the video. 

Artemis II rocket back at its launchpad after a second rollout at NASA's Kennedy Space Center

Ahead of the World Day for Glaciers, Copernicus Sentinel-2 captures the diverse landscape of western Norway with its jagged fjords, fertile valleys, mountain plateaus and Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe.

Proba-3's Coronagraph captured by the Occulter

First picture from Cupola by ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot during the εpsilon mission

The European Space Agency’s mission Plato is set to launch at the beginning of 2027 on a quest to find Earth-like planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun. The spacecraft will board the Ariane 6 with two boosters for a launch from Europe’s Spaceport, in French Guiana.

After lift-off, Plato will travel towards the  Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. This animation shows Plato’s first moments in space and its trajectory towards L2. This is an equilibrium point of the Sun-Earth system that revolves around the Sun together with Earth. It is located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth in the direction opposite the Sun.

The spacecraft will approach this point after a one-month journey and then enter a large-amplitude orbit around it.

To hunt for exoplanets, Plato is equipped with 26 ultrasensitive cameras. They are specially designed to capture the tiniest variations in the intensity of a star’s light and thus spot the dimming effect caused by planets passing in front of their host stars.

The mission’s focus is to discover planets that circle Sun-like stars in the habitable zone – the ‘Goldilocks’ region, where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. These planets take several months to complete an orbit because of their distance from the host star: not too close, not too far. To spot them, Plato’s 26 eyes will stare at the same region of the sky continuously for a minimum of two years, during a mission that is planned to last at least 4 years.

During these long observations, the spacecraft must be periodically reoriented to ensure that the solar arrays are pointed towards the Sun. This is achieved by rotating the spacecraft by 90° roughly every 3 months, as shown in the animation.

At L2, Plato will join other space missions orbiting around this special point such as the ESA Euclid mission and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. 

Recap de l’événement au Grand Rex à Paris le 22 février pour le lancement de la mission εpsilon.

Over a few days in January 2026, a particularly strong X-class solar flare caused a geomagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere, with some of the most intense radiation storms on record. The cause was an eruption on the Sun’s surface, which released high energy particles that reached Earth within 25 hours. ESA’s ice mission, CryoSat had just received an important software update, enabling the mission to not only monitor polar ice sheets and sea ice, but to also provide scientific data on Earth’s magnetic field.

As shown in this video, data from CryoSat, together with data from two of Swarm’s satellites, as well as data from the Macau Science Satellite-1 (MMS-1) and NASA’s GRACE-FO satellite, was used to model the intensity of the disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field, caused by the solar flare. The colours on the map represent intensity extremes, with the dark orange indicating where Earth’s magnetic field increased in strength, while the dark blue indicates where the magnetic field got weaker. The magnetic intensity highs and lows over the three-day period in 19-22 January illustrates the disturbance in Earth’s magnetosphere.

The Disturbance Storm Time (DST) index, shown below the map, indicates the severity of geomagnetic storms, measured in nano-Tesla (nT). The more negative the DST value, the stronger the storm, suggesting that the storm was at its most powerful just after mid-day on 20 January.

Read full story: How does an ice satellite detect a geomagnetic storm?

A cosmic ray simulator for extreme science on Earth

Watch the replay of the CELESTE pre-launch media briefing. The briefing covered the mission details of the ahead of the inaugural launch of ESA’s Celeste LEO-PNT in-orbit demonstration constellation. The first two satellites are scheduled to lift off no earlier than 24 March aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from New Zealand.

[EN] “Believe in your dreams, believe in yourself, and believe in that little nothing, that εpsilon, that can change everything…”

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, currently on board the International Space Station for the εpsilon mission, shared an inspiring message on Sunday 8 March 2026 to mark International Women’s Day.

[FR] « Croyez en vous. Croyez en vos rêves et en ce petit rien, cet εpsilon, qui peut changer une trajectoire… »

L’astronaute de l’ESA Sophie Adenot, actuellement à bord de la Station spatiale internationale pour la mission εpsilon, a partagé un message inspirant à l’occasion de la Journée internationale des droits des femmes, le dimanche 8 mars 2026.

Following a two-week journey from the Netherlands, the Maritime Nantaise Colibri cargo ship carrying the Smile spacecraft docked in Kourou, French Guiana on Thursday 26 February.

Smile was then unloaded, transported to Europe's Spaceport, and then unpacked. During the coming weeks, the spacecraft will go through final preparations for its launch on a Vega-C rocket between 8 April and 7 May.

Find out more

Smile (the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) is a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

These two views from Copernicus Sentinel-2 reveal the landscape transformation in the area around Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.