Front Page / Titelseite

ESA plans mission to smallest asteroid ever visited

ESA’s planet-defending Hera mission will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but the smaller of these two worldlets, comparable in size to Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, will become the smallest asteroid ever visited.

read more … http://bit.ly

via ESA Operations http://bit.ly/1Canxo4

What to expect when Hayabusa2 collects a sample from Ryugu

More than 4 years after launch and a half year surveying asteroid Ryugu, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is ready for sample collection.

read more … http://bit.ly/2ttC5hu

via Planetary Society Blog http://bit.ly/QRHOCj

Earth’s atmosphere stretches out to the Moon – and beyond

A recent discovery based on observations by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, shows that the gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630 000 km away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet

read more … https://ift.tt/2GRvwNP

via ESA Science & Technology http://sci.esa.int

Hubble helps uncover origin of Neptune’s smallest moon Hippocamp

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, along with older data from the Voyager 2 probe, have revealed more about the origin of Neptune’s smallest moon. The moon, which was discovered in 2013 and has now received the official name Hippocamp, is believed to be a fragment of its larger neighbour Proteus.

read more … https://ift.tt/2T8qMtF

via ESA Science & Technology http://sci.esa.int