Every Cosmic Herald story on European Space Agency — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
ESA's 2026 Space Environment Report warns of runaway collision growth and adds a new reentry casualty-risk metric, and weeks later LeoLabs spotted tens of fragments from the long-dead Soviet satellite Meteor 2-7 near 855 km.
Read the story →Crew-12's Dragon Freedom splashed down off Los Angeles on Oct. 8 after 237 days. Two days later ESA's Sophie Adenot landed in Cologne holding a new European record for the longest single spaceflight, and ESA is pointing to December's ministerial meeting in Rome.
Modelling built on Mars Express images can reproduce the 1,800-km Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud only if water vapour freezes straight into ice without dust seeds. If the result holds, it is the first evidence of homogeneous nucleation in any planetary atmosphere.
Two years after launch, ESA's Hera has picked out the Didymos binary from about 236,500 km away and is about to fire its thrusters for 93 minutes, the first of the braking burns that should bring it alongside the asteroid DART struck.
Solar Orbiter flew through a magnetic switchback and found oxygen and carbon that could only have formed in hot coronal loops. The result points to interchange reconnection as the source, with Alfvén waves taking over later.
A cloud up to 1,800 km long that trails Mars's Arsia Mons volcano only forms in models if water vapour freezes straight into ice with no dust seed, a process predicted for planetary atmospheres but never before seen in nature.
ESA and Vast have replaced their 2024 agreement with a broader three-year MoU covering possible European astronaut missions to Vast's Haven station, hardware contributions and joint research, starting with a feasibility study as Europe plans for life after the ISS.
A new Webb image of NGC 7129, about 3,300 light-years away, cuts through the dust to show protostars, shocked gas, bow shocks and a 3.5-light-year cavity carved by the young 5-8 solar-mass star LkH-alpha 234.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 8:05 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 7, to undock Crew-12 from the ISS, with a Pacific splashdown off California around 11:34 a.m. Thursday. Crew-13 arrived after an Oct. 1 launch, and ESA's Sophie Adenot heads home with three spacewalks totalling 19 h 42 min.
Unexplained lines in 1999 Hubble spectra of white dwarf HS 0209+0832 turn out to be niobium and other heavy elements, evidence for what may be the first planet around a white dwarf that formed from its star's death rather than its birth.
China's Tianwen-3 team has cut its Mars landing-site shortlist to eight candidates rich in ancient standing-water evidence, with three finalists due by the end of 2026 ahead of a roughly 2028 launch aimed at returning samples by 2031.
A new Hubble image of NGC 4698, a Virgo Cluster spiral about 55 million light-years away, shows a bulge jutting out at a right angle to its disc and a core rotating perpendicular to everything around it.
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