Space is becoming ever more important to life on Earth – from managing climate change to responding to emergencies to digitalising the economy. To help policymakers and businesses take informed decisions about investing in space, ESA has today published plans to create robust and reliable data on the space economy, in collaboration with international partners.

Week in images: 11-15 December 2023

Discover our week through the lens

Image: As the holiday season swiftly approaches, frosty landscapes tend to be associated with the magical idea of a white Christmas. But this Copernicus Sentinel-3 image over the Antarctica Peninsula sheds light on a different perspective.

Image: Dragon rider

Beijing (AFP) Dec 14, 2023
When Chang'e-3 became the first Chinese craft to land on the Moon 10 years ago, it kicked off nationwide celebrations - and a decade of major successes for a rapidly accelerating space programme. Since the December 14, 2013 landing, China has built a crewed space station, sent a robotic rover to Mars and become the first nation to make a controlled landing on the far side of the Moon. P

Boston MA (SPX) Dec 14, 2023
Peat bogs in the tropics store vast amounts of carbon, but logging, plantations, road building, and other activities have destroyed large swaths of these ecosystems in places like Indonesia and Malaysia. Peat formations are essentially permanently flooded forestland, where dead leaves and branches accumulate because the water table prevents their decomposition. The pileup of organic materi

Beijing, China (SPX) Dec 14, 2023
Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, or the "China Sky Eye," a team of Chinese astronomers built the largest-ever high-quality catalog of neutral hydrogen (HI) sources beyond our Galaxy. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a key component of galaxies. Within disk galaxies, the HI is a significant component of the interstellar medium. Th

Paris (ESA) Dec 14, 2023
Milani needs you! This is your chance to design a mission patch for the Milani CubeSat which will fly with ESA's Hera planetary defence spacecraft to the Didymos binary asteroid system. ESA is offering graphic designers and artists a unique opportunity to feature their work on the Milani CubeSat's mission patch. This competition is an exciting opportunity for students of graphic art or des