ESA Top Multimedia

Watch the keynote address by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher at the 18th European Space Conference in Brussels.

The European Space Conference is a key strategic event bringing together representatives from ESA, the European Commission, industry, national space agencies and other European institutions to discuss the future of Europe in space.

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On 17 January, the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft were rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to Launch Pad 39B. The 6.5-km journey took around 12 hours and was carried out using NASA's crawler-transporter, which has been moving rockets to launch pads for over 50 years.

At the top of the rocket sits the Orion spacecraft, bearing the ESA and NASA logo and designed to carry four astronauts on a 10-day lunar flyby mission. Artemis II will be the first crewed flight of the Artemis programme and the first time humans have ventured towards the Moon in over 50 years.

Their journey depends on our European Service Module, built by industry from more than 10 countries across Europe. This powerhouse will take over once Orion separates from the rocket, supplying electricity from tis four seven-metre-long solar arrays, providing air and water for the crew, and performing key propulsion burns during the mission, including the critical trans-lunar injection that sends the spacecraft and its crew on their trajectory towards the Moon.

ESA project astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski captured these stunning timelapse videos during his 20-day stay aboard the International Space Station as part of Axiom Mission 4, known as Ignis. Filmed from the Cupola – the Space Station’s iconic seven-windowed observation module – the footage showcases breathtaking views of Earth and the Moon from orbit.

Launched on 25 June 2025 aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, Sławosz conducted 13 experiments proposed by Polish institutions in collaboration with ESA, plus three ESA-led investigations. These spanned human research, materials science, biology, biotechnology and technology demonstrations.

The Ax-4 mission marks the second commercial human spaceflight for an ESA project astronaut. Ignis was sponsored by the Polish government and supported by ESA, the Polish Ministry of Economic Development and Technology (MRiT) and the Polish Space Agency (POLSA).   

Access the related broadcast quality footage. 

After being selected to join the ESA Academy Experiments programme, three student teams from universities across Europe were invited to carry out the experimental part of their research projects in ESA’s test facilities with support and guidance from experts.

For their experiments, the student teams made use of ESA’s ORBIT facility – a part of the Orbital Robotic Laboratory (ORL) located at ESTEC, the agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands. ORBIT consists of a 43 m² ultra-flat floor – the height difference between its lowest and highest points is less than a millimetre.

The Skywalker team from Aalborg University, Denmark, used the simulated two-dimensional microgravity environment to test the reinforcement learning algorithms they have developed for their robotic arm. Their project aims to demonstrate the concept of autonomous crawling in microgravity.

In the very first ORBIT facility experiment involving human participants, the V-STARS team from Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Kent, UK, investigated the relationship between the human vestibular system (region of the inner ear responsible for body balance) and the perception of verticality in a microgravity environment.

The GRASP team from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, explored an innovative approach to performing manoeuvres with non-cooperative objects in space. The robotic arm they have developed themselves is sporting an adhesive gripper inspired by geckos.

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Solar Orbiter’s most detailed view yet of a large solar flare, observed during its 30 September 2024 close approach to the Sun. 

The imagery was published in 2025, but now scientists have focused in on the details to uncover an exciting and surprising result: individual solar flares are triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent – much like an avalanche on a snowy mountain. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.

For the first time, this process is revealed in the video shown here, along with the supplementary videos featured in the full story.

When Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) first started observing the region at about 23:06 Universal Time (UT), a dark arch-like ‘filament’ of twisted magnetic fields and plasma was already present, connected to a cross-shaped structure of progressively brightening magnetic field lines.

Zooming in to this feature shows that new magnetic field strands are appearing in every image frame – equivalent to every two seconds or less. Each strand is magnetically contained, and they become twisted, like ropes. Then, just like in a typical avalanche, the region becomes unstable. The twisted strands begin to break and reconnect, rapidly triggering a cascade of further destabilisations in the area. This creates progressively stronger reconnection events and outflows of energy, seen as increasing brightness in the imagery.

A sudden brightening begins at 23:29 UT, followed by the dark filament disconnecting from one side, launching into space and at the same time violently unrolling at high speed. The unwinding closest to the footprint is recorded at 250 km/s, increasing to 400 km/s at the site of disconnection. Bright sparks of reconnection are seen all along the filament in stunning high resolution as the flare erupts at 23:47 UT.

At the same time, ribbon-like features are seen moving extremely quickly down through the Sun’s atmosphere. These streams of ‘raining plasma blobs’ are signatures of energy deposition from the reconnection events, which get stronger and stronger as the flare progresses. Even after the flare subsides, the rain continues for some time.

While EUI captured this high-resolution imagery, Solar Orbiter’s SPICE and STIX instruments monitored the temperatures and particle emissions at different layers in the Sun’s atmosphere. They revealed the slow rise of ultraviolet to x-ray emission prior to the flare, followed by a dramatic increase in x-ray emission during the main phase of the flare – signifying that particles were accelerated to 40-50% the speed of light equivalent to about 431–540 million km/h. This was recorded close to the base of the filament connection point as it unfurled into space.

After the main phase of the flare, the original cross-shape of magnetic field lines relaxes and the instruments see the plasma cool down to ‘normal’ levels. Bundles of looped magnetic field lines and suspended plasma – ‘arcades’ – hang over the flare site for some time.

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Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. The EUI instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB).