CSTD Strategy and Implementation Plan (SIP) 2022-2026

Video: 00:05:16 ESA's newly graduated astronauts reach the end of one year of rigorous basic astronaut training. Discover the journey of Sophie Adenot, Rosemary Coogan, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Raphaël Liégeois, Marco Sieber, and Australian Space Agency astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg. Selected in November 2022, the group began their training in April 2023.Basic astronaut training provides the candidates with an overall familiarisation and training in various areas, such as spacecraft systems, spacewalks, flight engineering, robotics and life support systems as well as survival and medical training. They received astronaut certification at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre on 22 April 2024.Following certification, the new astronauts will move on to the next phases of pre-assignment and mission-specific training - paving the way for future missions to the International Space Station and beyond.

Video: 00:00:48 This otherworldly, ever-changing landscape is what the Sun looks like up close. ESA's Solar Orbiter filmed the transition from the Sun's lower atmosphere to the much hotter outer corona. The hair-like structures are made of charged gas (plasma), following magnetic field lines emerging from the Sun's interior.The brightest regions are around one million degrees Celsius, while cooler material looks dark as it absorbs radiation. This video was recorded on 27 September 2023 by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on Solar Orbiter. At the time, the spacecraft was at roughly a third of the Earth’s distance from the Sun, heading for a closest approach of 43 million km on 7 October.On the same day that this video was recorded, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe skimmed just 7.26 million km from the solar surface. Rather than directly imaging the Sun, Parker measures particles and the magnetic field in the Sun’s corona and in the solar wind. This was a perfect opportunity for the two missions to team up, with ESA-led Solar Orbiter’s remote-sensing instruments observing the source region of the solar wind that would subsequently flow past Parker Solar Probe.Spot the moss, spicules, eruption and rainLower left corner: An intriguing feature visible throughout this movie is the bright gas that makes delicate, lace-like patterns across the Sun. This is called coronal ‘moss’. It usually appears around the base of large coronal loops that are too hot or too tenuous to be seen with the chosen instrument settings.On the solar horizon: Spires of gas, known as spicules, reach up from the Sun’s chromosphere. These can reach up to a height of 10 000 km.Centre around 0:22: A small eruption in the centre of the field of view, with cooler material being lifted upwards before mostly falling back down. Don’t be fooled by the use of ‘small’ here: this eruption is bigger than Earth!Centre-left around 0:30: ‘Cool’ coronal rain (probably less than 10 000 °C) looks dark against the bright background of large coronal loops (around one million degrees). The rain is made of higher-density clumps of plasma that fall back towards the Sun under the influence of gravity.Click here for a version of this video without annotations.For the best possible video quality, please accept website cookies.

Exciting news for young space fans! PaniniPedia Space, the most complete and up-to-date sticker reference album about space, launches in France on 1 May 2024. Created by Panini in collaboration with ESA, PaniniPedia Space takes readers on a journey of discovery through our Solar System and beyond.

ESA ensures a ride into space for its Smile mission, with Arianespace signing up to launch the spacecraft on a Vega-C rocket