A miniaturised model of the Juice spacecraft during electromagnetic tests at ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands. Juice, or the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, is ESA’s future mission to explore the most massive planet in Solar System and its large moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. Planned for launch in June 2022, it will embark on…
Image: Radar Footprints Over Buried Mars Lake
ESA’s Mars Express radar team recently made an exciting announcement: data from their instrument points to a pond of liquid water buried about 1.5 km below the icy south polar ice of Mars. Between 2012 and 2015 Mars Express made repeated passes over the 200 km wide study region in Planum Australe, bouncing radio waves through…
Image: Tiangong-1 Spotted In Space Via Radar
In the next few days, an unoccupied Chinese space station, Tiangong-1, is expected to reenter the atmosphere following the end of its operational life. Most of the craft should burn up. ESA is hosting a campaign to follow the reentry, conducted by the Inter Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC). The 13 space agencies/organisations of IADC are…
Photo of the Day: Winter Moon
This gorgeous image shows this month’s full moon, also known as a ‘cold moon’, seeming to hover above a set of satellite tracking dishes on the campus of the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aerospacial (INTA), in the southern part of the Canary Islands’ Gran Canaria, at Montaña Blanca. One of the antennas – the 15…
RF Testing of Space Antenna Coatings
Candidate coatings for a new space antenna undergoing testing at ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands. “Protective coatings safeguard antennas against temperature extremes or other environmental factors such as ultraviolet radiation,” explains antenna engineer Elena Saenz, performing the testing at ESA’s technical centre in Noordwijk. “Working with industry, we were asked to evaluate several candidate…
Photo of the Day: Rainbow Over Malargue Station Antenna Dish
This beautiful image was captured on Tuesday, 14 June, by Diego Aloi, working as part of the local engineering team at Malargüe station. The dish is located 30 km south of the city of Malargüe, about 1200 km west of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Malargüe is ESA’s newest deep-space tracking station; it was inaugurated in December…
All-in-One 3D-Printed Space Antenna
A prototype 3D-printed antenna being put to work in ESA’s Compact Antenna Test Facility, a shielded chamber for antenna and radio-frequency testing. “This is the Agency’s first 3D-printed dual-reflector antenna,” explains engineer Maarten van der Vorst, who designed it. “Incorporating a corrugated feedhorn and two reflectors, it has been printed all-in-one in a polymer, then…
