Juice rerouted to Venus in world’s first lunar-Earth flyby
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has successfully completed a world-first lunar-Earth flyby, using the gravity of Earth to send it Venus-bound, on a shortcut to Jupiter through the inner Solar System.
First ‘glory’ on hellish distant world?
For the first time, potential signs of the rainbow-like ‘glory effect’ have been detected on a planet outside our Solar System. Glory are colourful concentric rings of light that occur only under peculiar conditions.
Data from ESA’s sensitive Characterising ExOplanet Satellite, Cheops, along with several other ESA and NASA missions, suggest this delicate phenomenon is beaming straight at Earth from the hellish atmosphere of ultra-hot gas giant WASP-76b, 637 light-years away.
Seen often on Earth, the effect has only been found once on another planet, Venus. If confirmed, this first extrasolar glory will reveal more about the nature of this puzzling exoplanet, with exciting lessons for how to better understand strange, distant worlds.
Ten Camera Flight Models ready for integration: names unveiled
How many earth-like planets orbit the habitable zone of solar-like stars? How planets form and evolve in their planetary systems? What about the interaction with their stars? These are among the questions the ESA PLATO mission is called to answer, through exquisite...
ESA’s Cheops helps unlock rare six-planet system
A rare star system with six exoplanets has been unlocked with the help of ESA’s Cheops mission. The discovery is particularly valuable because the planets’ orbital configuration shows that the system is largely unchanged since its formation more than a billion years ago.