The International Space Station with ESA’s Columbus laboratory flies 400 km high at speeds that defy gravity – literally. At 28 800 km/h it only takes 90 minutes for the weightless laboratory to make a complete circuit of Earth. Astronauts working and living on the Station experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.
Posted on Friday August 1st, 2025 by Marie Deschamps
Last Thursday, a team of robots explored a simulated martian landscape in Germany, guided by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. This was the final session of the Surface Avatar experiment, a joint initiative between ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to investigate how astronauts can remotely control robotic teams to carry out […]
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Posted on Wednesday April 23rd, 2025 by Marie Deschamps
Now on the way to its new home in space, ESA’s Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) will soon be ready to explore some of the most fundamental questions in physics, from the nature of gravity to the definition of time itself. At the heart of ACES are two complementary clocks: the caesium-based PHARAO and […]
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Posted on Thursday April 17th, 2025 by Marie Deschamps
In just a few days, ESA’s Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) will launch to the International Space Station, carrying the most accurate timepieces ever sent to orbit. This pioneering mission is set to revolutionise timekeeping, enabling ultra-precise global time synchronisation and opening up new frontiers in fundamental physics research. Here are 7 things you […]
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Posted on Thursday April 10th, 2025 by Marie Deschamps
Timekeeping is about to reach new heights with ACES, the Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space. Built by Airbus for ESA, ACES will be launched to the International Space Station on 21 April and installed outside ESA’s Columbus laboratory. The instrument features two cutting-edge atomic clocks, PHARAO and SHM, which will work together to generate the […]
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Posted on Wednesday October 23rd, 2024 by Nadjejda
On this day in 2001, former ESA astronaut Claudie Haigneré became the first European woman to visit the International Space Station.
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Posted on Wednesday August 7th, 2024 by Marie Deschamps
NASA astronauts Tracy Dyson and Jeanette Epps operated from space a team of robots on Earth in the third session of the Surface Avatar experiment, a collaboration between ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The robot team, consisting of ESA’s Interact rover, and DLR’s Rollin’ Justin and robot dog Bert, worked in a simulated […]
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Posted on Wednesday July 31st, 2024 by Nadjejda
Space missions come with a unique set of challenges – while these are hurdles that every astronaut must overcome, space agencies had not, up to this day, interrogated their impact on an astronaut with a physical disability.
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Posted on Friday May 17th, 2024 by Marie Deschamps
This summer marks the ten-year anniversary of the electromagnetic levitation facility on the International Space Station. Helping to reveal the core physics at play in materials science, the Electromagnetic Levitator (EML) is a furnace in ESA’s Columbus laboratory that can melt metals by induction heating them up to 2200 °C. Scientists can then observe the samples […]
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