esa

ESA and China's joint Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer launched on 19 May from French Guiana after a six-week delay, beginning a three-year mission to image the magnetosphere in soft X-rays and ultraviolet for the first time.

ESA's Mars Express has released a new HRSC image of Shalbatana Vallis, a 1,300 km equatorial channel that was carved when groundwater erupted onto the Martian surface roughly 3.5 billion years ago.

Berlin signing on 7 May commits Japan to launch ESA's Ramses probe on an H3 rocket in 2028, in time to escort Apophis through its 32,000 km flyby of Earth.

A Western University team led by Jan Cami used JWST's MIRI instrument to image planetary nebula Tc 1, finding C60 buckyballs confined to a hollow shell around the white dwarf and revealing an unexplained question-mark structure at the center.

A subsystem production defect forced Avio to delay the Vega-C VV29 flight carrying ESA and China's SMILE magnetosphere-imaging mission, originally set for April 9, with no new date confirmed.

UK startup Pulsar Fusion demonstrated the first-ever plasma ignition inside a nuclear fusion rocket exhaust system, streaming the test live from Bletchley to Amazon's MARS Conference in California.

The joint ESA-Chinese Academy of Sciences SMILE spacecraft reached French Guiana after a two-week ocean voyage and is preparing for an April launch on a Vega-C rocket. It will be the first mission to image Earth's magnetosphere in soft X-rays.

A 30-fold expansion of the solar-twin catalog shows the Sun migrated 10,000 light-years outward from the galactic center between four and six billion years ago, carried by the forming central bar.

Six months of observations of the third interstellar object ever detected have uncovered water, methane, and hydrogen cyanide in its coma--and a Jupiter flyby on March 16 could yield the closest-ever look at an interstellar visitor.

A 15-hour JWST observation has produced the first three-dimensional map of Uranus's ionosphere, confirming decades-long atmospheric cooling and exposing how the planet's tilted, offset magnetic field sculpts complex auroral structures unlike any seen elsewhere in the solar system.

Europe's Ariane 6 flew its four-booster configuration for the first time, delivering 32 Amazon Leo satellites in the heaviest payload ever launched by a European rocket.

NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 mission is confirmed for February 11 after FAA clears Falcon 9 following a second-stage anomaly, while a historic policy change will let astronauts carry personal smartphones into orbit for the first time.