Want to become my colleague? #ESA is looking for a planetary scientist to fill the role of the archives scientist for the planetary science archive, initially assigned to #Mars missions:
(OK, almost my colleague, same agency, different location - you'd be based in Villanueva de la Cañada close to Madrid, Spain, while I'm in Noordwijk, NL).
Italy has put 15 cities on red alert for high temperatures, as a severe heatwave continues across much of southern Europe.
The European Space Agency, whose satellites monitor land and sea temperatures, has warned that parts of Italy could experience the highest temperatures ever recorded on the continent.
Sicily and Sardinia could see temperatures climb as high as 49 degrees Celsius.
These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:
Did you know that it's actually NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope? Even though it is often referred to as "NASA" only.
European Space Agency #ESA has contributed the NIRSpec instrument, half of the MIRI instrument, and the launch (including the payload adapter & launch site services) and has 15 scientists working at the science and operations center. #CSA, the Canadian Space Agency, has contributed the NIRISS instrument.
This is the surface of a comet! Dust is swirling around the surface of Comet 67/P -- captured in 2016 by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, processing by Jacint Roger Perez.
Still one of the most remarkable scenes in space exploration.
The James Webb Space Telescope just dropped this incredible new image of the Whirlpool Galaxy, a.k.a. Messier 51. Made with the Mid-InfraRed Imager (MIRI), it traces clouds of dust in the #galaxy glowing in infrared light. These clouds absorb starlight and re-radiate the energy at wavelengths too long for our eyes to see. To make the light visible to human eyes, a false color map has been applied.
We are launching the #ESA Science Newsletter! It serves the scientific community and welcomes everyone interested in more programmatic and technical news from the Directorate of Science: calls for proposals, announcements of opportunity, research fellowship announcements, calls for memberships, job announcements, major mission updates, conference announcements, etc. for all our missions!
A new data release from #ESA's #Gaia - disentangling the cores of globular clusters, accidentally doing cosmology, tracking asteroids, diffuse interstellar matter and a catalogue of pulsating stars.
LOTS of cool science including using observation modes that were not planned for science originally 🤯 (see blurb from @minzastro in the article!)
Data from ESA’s exoplanet mission Cheops has led to the surprising revelation that an ultra-hot exoplanet that orbits its host star in less than a day is covered by reflective clouds of metal, making it the shiniest exoplanet ever found.
This spring, #ESA launched the #Juice Mission to #Jupiter - but why does it need 8 years to get there when the Voyager space probes, many decades ago, needed under two? Well, because we don't want to just zoom past Jupiter but to hand around there for a while, doing cool science.
And once Juice reached Jupiter comes the even more complicated part - getting into the orbit!
Coming Monday (31. July) we will declare "First Light" for #ESAEuclid 🛰️ and show the first engineering images that the #VIS and #NISP instruments 📷 have taken of the sky, using a fully focussed telescope! 🔭
Yay! 🥳
That said, #Euclid has now also arrived at its ultimate distance from Earth, circling around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 😎🌏🛰️ - joining #ESAGaia and #JWST:
#ESAEuclid had substantial issues with its Fine Guiding Sensors, part of the system that is designed to keep the spacecraft 🛰️ steadily oriented and pointed at the same spot. After a redesign of its software things work much better now. And look much better 🧐 . Because partially images after loss of guide-star lock looked like this. Read more at #ESA:
Ariel is #3 of ESA's dedicated #exoplanet missions (following #Cheops, a mission to characterize exoplanets around nearby bright stars, and #Plato, the terrestrial exoplanet hunter) and will focus on studying the atmospheres of the planets:
And another cool job with #ESA Directorate of Science - again freely choosing between ESAC, Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain or ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands as your main location: #Gaia project scientist!
Big step forward for space science today, with two new missions adopted into the #ESA science programme:
EnVision – probing Venus with imagers, spectrometers, & a synthetic aperture radar to characterise the atmosphere & surface of our nearest neighbour in unprecedented detail.
LISA – a space gravitational wave observatory to understand the physics of some of the most powerful events in the Universe, including the mergers of supermassive black holes.
In 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft rammed an asteroid at high speed. But it probably didn't leave a mark!
Most likely, DART changed the shape of the entire asteroid -- an important thing to know before we need to deflect a dangerous space rock away from Earth.
The main job of #ESA's #Gaia space telescope is to map our own galaxy in exquisite detail - but while doing so, is can also map the whole universe!
Using Gaia, we can map the distribution quasars - brightly shining centers of galaxies hosting supermassive black holes - across the universe, all the way back to just 1.5 billion years after the big bang or 12.3 billion years ago ...
We have made a 5min film about #ESAEuclid 🛰️ #FirstLight 💡, what these images are, what #Euclid's #science will be, and what the next steps are towards science-ready images.
Tomorrow, 23 May, 12:00 CEST, #ESA and the @ec_euclid will present 15 papers, including first #astronomy results:
5x #ESAEuclid reference papers about the main mission, the instrumentation, and related cosmological simulations
10x Early Release Observation #science papers, ranging from ... near to far
At the same time ESA will make 5 new ERO images public and the underlying science images. This programme was observed before the start of Euclid's main survey.
Newly discovered scorching exoplanet has metal clouds that act like a mirror, raining titanium (www.esa.int)
Data from ESA’s exoplanet mission Cheops has led to the surprising revelation that an ultra-hot exoplanet that orbits its host star in less than a day is covered by reflective clouds of metal, making it the shiniest exoplanet ever found.