One year in isolation

 

 
3 June 2011
The six men in the Mars500 facility near Moscow have been in isolation now 365 days. The European crewmembers have been writing in their latest letters home about the highlights, monotonous life, team spirit and determination to go on.
 
“Wow, it’s already been a year,” begins Diego Urbina, one of the two Mars500 crewmembers from ESA, in his latest diary entry.

“One way to visualise it is if you t

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News

Hot stuff: the making of BepiColombo

 

BepiColombo- ESA's Mercury mission

 
1 June 2011
For BepiColombo, ESA has had to extend the limits of existing design standards and develop altogether new design concepts as well. How to begin building a spacecraft that needs to endure sunlight 10 times more intense than in Earth orbit, with surfaces hotter than a kitchen hot plate – high enough, in fact, to melt lead?
 
Back in late 2000, when the mission...

ESA's Herschel mission

Keeping the power on in space

 

1 June 2011
All space missions have one inescapable dependency: the electricity flowing through their systems to keep them alive. Take away its power and a spacecraft is nothing more than space debris – an eventuality the space power professionals strive to avoid.
 
Next week sees more than 250 experts come together at an ESA-organised conference on power systems. The Ninth European Space Power...

 

Twitter

Take part in ESA's Cool Comet Campaign

 

30 May 2011
Do you use Twitter? Are you as intrigued by comets as we are? Then tell us 'Why comets are cool' and you might win a trip to ESA's operations centre in Germany on 15 June to celebrate 25 years of cometary science at ESA.
 
If you're fascinated by comets, you're not alone. For millennia, philosophers, poets, astronomers and kings have gazed up — sometimes in terror, always in awe — as com...

  

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	Roberto Vittori floats through the Destiny Roberto Vittori and STS-134 crew - watch the replay   26 May 2011 ESA astronaut Roberto Vittori, currently aboard the International Space Station on his DAMA mission, has spoken to the press today,

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CalendarPublicationsFrequently asked questionsESA-sponsored ConferencesHelpSite CreditsPortal terms of useCommentsSubscribe

 

 

 

 

 

 

	Self portrait by Ales Rybka, ESA's research MD at Concordia in 2010 Calling all candidates for Concordia   21 April 2011 They are more cut off than the crew of the International Space Station. They are at Concordia in Antarctica, and one of

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