As head of ESA’s photo service, Stephane Corvaja’s job is to share the wonder – and awesome power – of spaceflight. Here, he reveals how he captured this image of VV21, the inaugural flight of the new Vega-C rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.

Week in images: 29 August - 02 September 2022

Discover our week through the lens

Beijing (XNA) Sep 02, 2022
A thousand people may have a thousand answers as to why we explore space. For 64-year-old Chinese scientist Wu Ji, exploring space has a more self-reflective meaning. "When one enters space, one will realize that human beings are an indivisible whole. Regardless of skin color, they have far more in common than they have differences," said Wu, chairman of the Chinese Society of Space Resear

Beijing (AFP) Sept 2, 2022
Two astronauts on board China's Tiangong space station successfully completed a six-hour spacewalk Friday, the national human spaceflight agency said. Astronauts Chen Dong and Liu Yang returned to their cabin module in the early hours of Friday, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said, declaring the first spacewalk of the six-month Shenzhou-14 mission a "complete success". China's heav

Ilmenau, Germany (SPX) Sep 02, 2022
Technische Universitat Ilmenau (Germany) is using Artificial Intelligence to improve the detection and classification of unidentified phenomena in the night sky. The research team of the Group for data-intensive Systems and Visualization collaborated with the American Meteor Society which initiated the AllSky7, an international network of scientists and amateur astronomers that permanently obser

Houston TX (SPX) Sep 02, 2022
Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism. "Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe," said Rice University's Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory

Baltimore MD (SPX) Sep 02, 2022
For the first time, astronomers have used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webb's powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way

Charlottesville VA (SPX) Sep 02, 2022
By precisely tracing a small, almost imperceptible, wobble in a nearby star's motion through space, astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting that star, which is one of a binary pair. Their work, using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), produced the first-ever determination of the complete, 3-dimensional structure of the orbits of a binary pair of

Charlottesville VA (SPX) Sep 02, 2022
Was there ever life on the moon? What about on other planets? With the U.S. slated to blast off soon to orbit the moon - its first trip there in 50 years - the University of Virginia and NASA's Artemis space missions seek to answer big questions like these, while pushing the scope of what can be analyzed on alien soils. The new collaborative research will take the form of a roving, ground-