ESA Top Multimedia

Watch the replay of ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher’s opening Remarks of the ‘General Assembly Defence, Space and Cybersecurity’ held in ESA, ESRIN on 12 September 2025.

The European Parliament and the European Commission, in collaboration with ESA, organised the ‘General Assembly Defence, Space and Cybersecurity’ to promote dialogue between European and national decision-makers, and industry representatives in the context of the unprecedented challenges that European Union is facing since the postwar period in an increasingly complex geopolitical context.

For this reason, Europe must work to strengthen its strategic autonomy in key sectors such as space, cybersecurity, and defence, within the broader context of the Atlantic Alliance. Acting at the European level in these areas, as demonstrated by projects like Galileo, EGNOS, and Copernicus, brings extraordinary added value in terms of innovation, industrial competitiveness, economies of scale, and spending efficiency, as well as for the security of citizens and the protection of critical infrastructure.

Access the text of the opening remarks.

Patch of Celeste, the first mission in the LEO-PNT programme. Celeste will demonstrate in orbit the potential of a layer of satellites in low Earth orbit to increase the robustness of navigation, positioning and timing signals.

In 2025, European satellite navigation celebrates its 30th anniversary - a milestone built on decades of innovation, collaboration and excellence. Three decades of challenges and triumphs that have shaped the navigation systems we rely on today: EGNOS and Galileo. Three decades that not only define our present but also lay the foundation for the satellite navigation systems of tomorrow.

The world runs on invisible satellite navigation signals: they fuel our society, generate economic growth and are integral to our security. But they can fade or vanish.

A pivotal step for more robust navigation is expanding to a system including a fleet of satellites in low Earth orbit, operating in a range of signals and frequencies.

ESA’s LEO-PNT demonstrator mission will test the potential of such a system in providing significant augmentation and diversity to Galileo and other existing systems, increasing resilience and enabling new services to places where today’s satnav systems cannot reach.

Solar Orbiter observed this coronal mass ejection (CME) on 19 November 2022.

A CME is a vast eruption of billions of tonnes of plasma and accompanying magnetic fields from the Sun’s outer atmosphere.

The Metis instrument images the Sun’s outer atmosphere by artificially covering its bright disc, similar to what happens during a total solar eclipse. In this movie, the Sun’s size and position is depicted by the white circle.

This CME was associated with a swell of energetic electrons, also picked up by Solar Orbiter. Read more about how Solar Orbiter traced these superfast electrons back to CMEs on the Sun.

The new research is published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, as part of a public catalogue of Solar Energetic Electron events observed by Solar Orbiter.

[Image description: The image shows a circular, reddish-brown pattern radiating outward from a dark central circle. The outer ring is filled with streaks and bursts of light, resembling solar rays or an explosion. The center is black with two thin concentric circles, and the bottom of the image displays the date and time 19 Nov 2022, 13:44. The image shows the Sun's outer atmosphere, with a coronal mass ejection bursting from the top right of the Sun.]

This seminar, presented by Dr. Gemma Kulk and Prof. Shubha Sathyendranath from Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference (UNOC), explores how satellite data from ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is transforming our understanding of ocean health. Learn how Earth observation and satellite monitoring reveal changes in the world’s oceans and support global ocean science.

This video shows a timelapse of the launch preparations for Europe’s first MetOp Second Generation, MetOp-SG-A1, weather satellite, which hosts the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission. MetOp-SG-A1 was launched aboard an Ariane 6 rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana, on 13 August at 02:37 CEST (12 August 21:37 Kourou time).

MetOp-SG-A1 is the first in a series of three successive pairs of satellites. The mission as a whole not only ensures the continued delivery of global observations from polar orbit for weather forecasting and climate analysis for more than 20 years, but also offers enhanced accuracy and resolution compared to the original MetOp mission – along with new measurement capabilities to expand its scientific reach.

This new weather satellite also carries the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission to deliver daily global data on air pollutants and atmospheric trace gases as well as aerosols and ultraviolet radiation.

Ariane 6 is Europe’s heavy launcher and a key element of ESA’s efforts to ensure autonomous access to space for Europe’s citizens. Ariane 6 has three stages: two or four boosters, and a main and upper stage. For this flight, VA264, the rocket was used in its two-booster configuration.