💥 ASTEROID COLLISION IN ANOTHER SOLAR SYSTEM 💥
That famous “planet” near the bright star Fomalhaut? Not a planet. New Hubble data shows it — and a second object — are expanding debris clouds from massive asteroid collisions. Astronomers now think these smashups are far more common than models predicted. Space is rough out there.
The Main Control Room at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt today 🛰️
This room sees launches, landings, mission sims, & more, & has been the scene of some of the greatest days in ESA’s history (& mine).
The spacecraft the MCR talks to are in, err, space 🤷♂️, but several have siblings at ESOC, engineering models with the same electronics & software, used to test procedures before uplinking to the real thing.
A darkened curved room filled with rows of consoles, chairs, and computer monitors, with large display screens on the opposite wall, dimmed lights above, and blue illuminated ESA logos at either side.
First up, the avionics model of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury.
I was at ESOC for the launch in the middle of European night in October 2018. Since then, the three-element spacecraft stack has made two trajectory-altering flybys of Earth, one of Venus, & six of Mercury itself, interspersed with long cruise & solar electric propulsion arcs.
It’s due to enter orbit around Mercury a year from now.
Second, the avionics model of ESA Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission to explore Jupiter, & three of its large Galilean moons, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede, finally entering orbit around the latter.
JUICE was launched in April 2023, when I was again at ESOC, is also making several planetary flybys, including the Moon & Earth in autumn last year.
Third, the avionics model for the ESA Euclid mission, a new one for me at ESOC.
The mission was launched in July 2023 & yet again, I was at ESOC to give presentations & interviews about the mission.
Its job is to survey ~40% of the whole sky, taking optical & IR images & spectra of many millions of galaxies, using their shapes, distances, & clustering to study the otherwise invisible Dark Matter & Dark Energy that compromise the bulk of our universe.
And finally, my personal favourite, the avionics model of ESA’s Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, with a model of its small Philae lander in the foreground.
The Rosetta model was used by the ops team from launch in March 2014, to arrival at 67P in August 2014, & during comet operations until September 2016.
It now lives in a special display box at ESOC, an emotional memory of perhaps ESA’s greatest ever mission 🚀🛰️☄️🙇♂️
#OTD thirty years ago, 2 December 1995 at 08:08:01 UTC, the ESA/NASA Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was launched from Cape Canaveral.
The mission has delivered extraordinary insights into our Sun, its interior, its surface, and its extended corona, as well as discovering thousands of sun-grazing comets.
And it continues to do so from the Sun-Earth L1 point via its two coronographic cameras, which captured this large coronal mass ejection yesterday morning.
Wow – didn’t think I’d be in tears today, but this message sent home from Gaia as it was shut down forever today hits hard 😭
What you’re seeing is a map of the 106 CCD detectors that Gaia used to measure the positions of billions of stars in the Milky Way for the past 11 years 🛰️✨
I was lucky to work on many amazing missions at ESA, including Solar Orbiter, BepiColombo, JUICE, Cassini, LISA Pathfinder, ExoMars TGO, SOHO, Mars & Venus Express, Cluster, CHEOPS, XMM, HST, Euclid, & of course Rosetta & JWST.
But arguably none are as fundamental as Gaia, the results from which will underpin all of #astronomy for decades to come ✊
It celebrates 10 years of science observations today & will likely stop in 2025 🫡