Last month, ESA’s woolly astronaut became Europe's first lunar ‘lamb-bassador’: Shaun the Sheep returned home from his Artemis I mission to a hero's welcome and then was herded off on a celebratory post-flight tour.

More than three weeks after efforts began to deploy Juice’s ice-penetrating Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna, the 16-metre-long boom has finally escaped its mounting bracket.

Week in images: 08-12 May 2023

Discover our week through the lens

The Ariane 6 Launcher Task Force consists of top management of ESA, launch base prime contractor CNES, launcher system prime contractor ArianeGroup and launch service provider Arianespace. This regular update will follow Task Force meetings, to report on the progress being made towards inaugural flight of the new Ariane 6 launcher.

The next update is expected on or soon after 8 June.

Beijing, China (SPX) May 12, 2023
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are the brightest millisecond-duration cosmic explosions in radio bands. Their unknown origin poses challenges for astronomy as well as physics. The Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS), a key program of the Five-hundred-meter Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), discovered the world's first persistently active repeating FRB, known as FRB 20190520B. Now this

Stevenage UK (SPX) May 11, 2023
Airbus has selected the National Satellite Test Facility (NSTF) at Harwell in Oxfordshire to carry out the comprehensive test campaign on the UK Ministry of Defence's next generation secure communications satellite SKYNET 6A. The 116 million pound government-funded NSTF, operated by experts from the STFC RAL Space (Science and Technology Facilities Council), will carry out the SKYNET 6A te

Luxembourg (SPX) May 11, 2023
EAGLE-1 consortium lead SES announces a new key partner, TESAT, responsible for developing and integrating the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) payload for the EAGLE-1 satellite. The SES and TESAT partnership is aimed at achieving the next key milestone in building and implementing Europe's pioneering quantum secure communications initiative EAGLE-1. Supported by the European Space Agency (E

Adelaide, Australia (SPX) May 09, 2023
SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), Australia's leading space research centre, has unveiled the Compact Hybrid Optical-RF User Segment (CHORUS) prototype terminal to create more stable and secured military satellite communications at the 15th Australian Space Forum. Funded by SmartSat CRC, the world-leading technology embedded in this prototype has been entirely developed in Austra

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image features the Japanese island of Nishinoshima, in the northwest Pacific Ocean.

Munich, Germany (SPX) May 12, 2023
Using ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of s