Rosetta has arrived at the comet

“We are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General. After 10 years of travelling through the solar system, the ESA’ Rosetta spacecraft began its manoeuvre to orbit the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014. The first images of the Rosetta’s rendezvous with the comet were presented during an event held at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany, on the same day.
Named after the Rosetta Stone, which was discovered in 1822 and whose engravings have helped to understand hieroglyphs, the Rosetta spacecraft was launched in 2004. The trajectory to reach…

First of ESA’s new generation of astronauts arrived at ISS

On 29 May 2013, Luca Parmitano, an Italian astronaut from the European Space Agency [ESA], arrived on the International Space Station [ISS] on a Soyuz rocket launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. At age 36, he is the youngest person selected for an extended-duration stay on the station as well as the first of the ESA’s new generation of astronauts to be on board the ISS.

L. Parmitano, together with Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, will be…

Planck results: Universe older, slower and still challenging

On 21 March 2013, ESA’s Planck satellite revealed the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background [CMB], the relic radiation from the Big Bang. The results from Planck’s new map provided an excellent confirmation of the standard model of cosmology with unprecedented accuracy. However, the existence of unexplained features may challenge the foundations of the current understanding of the Universe.

According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe rapidly expanded from extremely hot and dense plasma of photons…