Just moments ago, a piece of history: liftoff of the final ever flight of an Ariane 5 rocket, the 117th in the series, VA261 carrying the Heinrich-Hertz satellite & Syracuse 4B to space 🚀
Such an important launcher for ESA science over the decades, lifting XMM-Newton, Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, BepiColombo, JWST, & JUICE on the first part of their journeys of discovery 🙇♂️
Ever wondered what it sounds like when you close the door of a 11 metre wide, 9 metre deep, & 16.4 metre high concrete chamber?
Wonder no more – my Test Centre colleague, Jan Demming, demonstrates the ~20 second reverb time of the Large European Acoustic Facility at ESA's ESTEC today 🙉
Normally used to test satellites under the enormously loud conditions of launch, we were in the LEAF today for quite a different purpose 😉
Excellent news: as hoped for, JAXA’s upside-down moon lander, SLIM, has woken up again now that the Sun has shifted in the lunar sky, allowing light to fall on its solar panels.
My weekly space news show Ad Astra is here! Have 10 minutes? Then you can hear about my favorite space, space science, and space flight stories this week.
The first image from #BepiColombo's third flyby at Mercury is out, taken at lunchtime today on the inbound leg 🛰️📷
Closest approach at 236km above the surface is tonight at 19:34UTC/21:34CEST, with Bepi coming from the nightside, across the terminator, & into sunlight 🌑🌞
We'll aim to release those pictures, all taken with the black & white monitoring cameras, tomorrow 🙂👍
Here’s the time lapse we made of ESA/JAXA #BepiColombo’s third of six flybys of Mercury earlier this week, as the spacecraft emerged from behind the planet & watched it recede 🛰️🌓
There’s also a “shape from shading” 3D flyover of Manley Crater & Beagle Rupes made with the data by Kay Wohlfarth at TU Dortmund 🛸
All set to a new musical composition by our friend ILĀ 🎶
The 117th & final launch of an #Ariane5 rocket is scheduled this afternoon.
Ariane 5 has played a crucial role in ESA's science programme from the very first flight, the failed launch of Cluster I in 1996, to almost the last, with JUICE's success in April.
And between have come XMM-Newton, Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, BepiColombo, & JWST, all outstanding scientific missions 👏
Thank you Arianespace & CNES, & ad astra, Ariane 5 🙇♂️🚀✨
It’s a very special privilege to be able to wake up in the morning & be among the first people on this planet to see new images beamed back overnight from another 😱
It’s equally special to be able to work alongside the amazing people spanning the many professions in & around ESA who make such things possible 🙇♂️
Looking forward to sharing the latest #BepiColombo pictures from Mercury with you later today 🛰️🙂👍
Today’s the day that Aeolus, ESA’s successful pioneering LiDAR mission to measure Earth’s wind, is due to meet its end, ironically enough at the hands of that wind as it descends into the atmosphere from space 🌍💨🛰️
Follow the drama on the live blog, as our colleagues at ESA mission operations in Darmstadt use the last of Aeolus’s propellant to make a semi-controlled re-entry ☄️😬🤞
Update on the status of JAXA’s SLIM moon lander: an image taken by its small LEV-2/SORA-Q “ball”, relayed to Earth by the LEV-1 hopper rover.
SLIM landed within 55 metres of its planned touchdown, but on its “head” rather than its side as planned, meaning its solar panels could not receive light.
It ran on batteries for 3 hours before being turned off. However, as the Sun moves across the lunar sky, light could reach the panels & revive SLIM.
Outstanding news from our ESA #JUICEmission to Jupiter & its icy moons, launched on 14 April 🚀🛰️
The 16-metre long RIME radar antenna, designed to probe up to 10 kilometres into the icy crusts of Ganymede, Europa, & Callisto, has now been successfully deployed, after earlier problems 👍
Excellent work by our project & operations team, & fantastic news for all of the scientists involved 🙇♂️
My good friend @bbcamos spotted this superb slo-mo video of the #JUICEmission#VA260 Ariane 5 emerging from behind the launch tower on 14 April – it was among a B-roll compilation from Arianespace released on our ESA website.
It was also tweeted yesterday by @esa with a Holst soundtrack.
So here's my version: speeded up to real-time, starting with the Vulcain & EAP ignitions, then the tower shot, with representative audio.
#OTD nine years ago: ESA’s Rosetta deploys Philae towards the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko 🛰️☄️
It remains one of the greatest honours of my life to have been involved with the mission & to work with so many amazing people spanning science, engineering, operations, outreach, & communications 🙇♂️
NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to “live off the land,” awarding several contracts to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile....
Transferring around 80GB of videos from my phone to a backup drive: lots of interesting things taken over the past three years or so.
Here's one: my view of Ariane 5 VA256 in the BAF at CSG Kourou in French Guiana on 23 December 2021, with #JWST on top, ahead of rollout to launch pad ELA-3 & their flight into space legend on Christmas Day.
Our colleagues from the Japanese space agency JAXA are currently attempting the soft landing of their SLIM spacecraft on the Moon & you can watch live online 👇
In spaceflight news today, China is about to launch three of its astronauts on Shenzhou 18 towards the Tiangong space station: liftoff is in about 7 minutes from now.
Should be going on CGTN within the next hour to talk about the mission & international collaboration in space exploration.
The latter is certainly an interesting question given the current geopolitical context 😬
Excited to (finally!) announce that my artwork FAREWELL TO BENNU is on the back cover of The Planetary Society’s December 2023 issue of THE PLANETARY REPORT!
ESA’s pioneering wind mission, #Aeolus, was guided to a re-entry over Antarctica last night, ensuring that any remaining hardware landed safely in the Atlantic 🌊🌍
This successfully demonstrated new techniques for #SpaceDebris mitigation – kudos to our colleagues at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt 🖖🤘
This Canadian satellite was supposed to last 2 years in space. It's now celebrating 20 (www.space.com)
Scisat tracks changes in the atmosphere that could 'delay the ozone recovery in a warming world.'
NASA funds moon projects to help missions to ‘live off the land’ (www.msn.com)
NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to “live off the land,” awarding several contracts to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile....