Welcome

on my webpage! I’m a spacecraft analyst at the European Space Operations Centre via Telespazio Germany GmbH. In particular, I am a member of a large team operating Earth Explorer spacecrafts. In the past I have worked as an astrophysicist studing accreting neutron stars and cosmological neutrino sources. For more details please have a look at the “About me” menu.

ESA Space Science News

The following news are a copy of the ESA space science news, for which I thank ESA for authorization. In order to read the full articles please follow the corresponding links.

Webb captures rarely seen prelude to a supernova

14/03/2023

A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail.
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Inspiring mocktail menu served up by Space Juice winners

10/03/2023

An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted to the Agency’s #SpaceJuice competition  in January.
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Hubble captures movie of DART asteroid impact debris

01/03/2023

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of rapid changes to the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 545-kilogram spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The primary objective of the NASA mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. Though Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, data from the mission could help inform researchers how to potentially change an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary.
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Meet Carole Mundell, new Director of Science

01/03/2023

Carole Mundell is the new Director of Science, succeeding the current director Günther Hasinger.
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Seeing triple

28/02/2023

This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the massive galaxy cluster RX J2129.
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Juice one step closer to launch

21/02/2023

After many years of study, development, building and testing, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has finally arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
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Mercury’s black disc helps sharpen Solar Orbiter’s view

20/02/2023

This year started with a nice imaging opportunity for Solar Orbiter, and a chance to further improve the quality of its data. On 3 January 2023, inner planet Mercury crossed the spacecraft’s field of view, resulting in a transit where Mercury appeared as a perfectly black circle moving across the face of the Sun.
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Euclid electromagnetic compatibility tests successful

20/02/2023

ESA’s Euclid mission is undergoing the final test before launch in July 2023.
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Webb reveals intricate networks of gas and dust in nearby galaxies

16/02/2023

Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope are getting their first look at star formation, gas, and dust in nearby galaxies with unprecedented resolution at infrared wavelengths. The data have enabled an initial collection of 21 research papers which provide new insight into how some of the smallest-scale processes in the Universe — the beginnings of star formation — impact the evolution of the largest objects in our cosmos: galaxies.
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Euclid in a nutshell

13/02/2023

ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe.
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Introducing Juice’s odyssey of exploration

13/02/2023

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has an ambitious mission ahead.
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A spiral amongst thousands

31/01/2023

A crowded field of galaxies throngs this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, along with bright stars crowned with Webb’s signature six-pointed diffraction spikes.
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A wreath of star formation

21/12/2022

Webb's picture of the month December is dominated by NGC 7469, a luminous, face-on spiral galaxy approximately 90 000 light-years in diameter that lies roughly 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.
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Webb glimpses field of extragalactic PEARLS, studded with galactic diamonds

15/12/2022

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured one of the first medium-deep wide-field images of the cosmos, featuring a region of the sky known as the North Ecliptic Pole.
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Solar snake spotted slithering across Sun’s surface

14/11/2022

Solar Orbiter has spotted a ‘tube’ of cooler atmospheric gases snaking its way through the Sun’s magnetic field.
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