A capacity increase by almost 80%! In late July 2024, the Malargüe deep-space communication station completed an important upgrade of its antenna feed that will allow missions to send much more data back to Earth.

Week in images: 13-17 January 2025 Discover our week through the lens

Image: Seed-sized space chip

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice.

The largest photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations, unveils hundreds of millions of stars. It took more than 10 years to collect data for this colorful portrait of our neighbouring galaxy and was created from more than 600 snapshots. This stunning, colourful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars, and is spread across roughly 2.5 billion pixels.

With ESA’s EarthCARE satellite and four measuring instruments all working extremely well and fully commissioned, the mission’s ‘first level’ data stream is now freely available.By combining data from all four instruments, scientists ultimately aim to address a critical Earth science question: how do clouds and aerosols affect the heating and cooling of our atmosphere?

There is an increasing willingness in the space sector to tackle the problem of space debris. Yet much of the required technology to mitigate or prevent its risks is still missing.Preventing new debris, avoiding collisions and the timely clearance of satellites from orbit at their end-of-mission are complex challenges that each require a variety of practical solutions.Released to the public on 15 January 2025, the Zero Debris Technical Booklet is a community-driven document that identifies technologies that will contribute to the goal of Zero Debris by 2030. Essentially, the Booklet forms a technical Zero Debris 'to-do list'.

Video: 00:02:05 This is a new artist’s animation of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even seemingly simple ideas about the nature of our galaxy’s central bar and the spiral arms have been overturned. Gaia has shown us that it has more than two spiral arms and that they are less prominent than we previously thought. In addition, Gaia has shown that its central bar is more inclined with respect to the Sun.No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so we can’t take a selfie, but Gaia is giving us the best insight yet of what our home galaxy looks like. Once all of Gaia’s observations collected over the past decade are made available in two upcoming data releases, we can expect an even sharper view of the Milky Way.Click here to download the still image of the Milky Way.

In 2023, ESA published more than 400 vacancies in engineering, science and business and administration and more positions continue to be published as we are always on the lookout for talented new colleagues to join us. So, what does it mean to join ESA? Here are five reasons why you should consider ESA as the next step in your career!