ESA is excited to announce a revolutionary new technology that could bring luck to people all over the world: four-leaf clover detection from space.

Week in images: 27-31 March 2023

Discover our week through the lens

The Making of Juice series takes the viewer behind the scenes of the European space industry, space technology and planetary science communities around ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission.

Juice has a state-of-the-art science payload comprising remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. This episode focuses on the geophysics instruments, which will explore the moons’ surface and subsurface, probe the atmospheres of Jupiter and its moons, and measure their gravity fields.

The GAnymede Laser Altimeter (GALA) will study the tidal deformation of Ganymede and the topography of the surfaces of the icy moons. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), is an ice-penetrating radar to study the subsurface structure of the icy moons down to a depth of around nine kilometres. The Gravity & Geophysics of Jupiter and Galilean Moons (3GM), is a radio package that will study the gravity field at Ganymede, the extent of the internal oceans on the icy moons, and the structure of the neutral atmosphere and ionosphere of Jupiter and its moons.

The mission will also carry out a Planetary Radio Interferometer & Doppler Experiment (PRIDE), which will use the standard telecommunication system of the spacecraft, together with radio telescopes on Earth to perform precise measurements of the spacecraft position and velocity to investigate the gravity fields of Jupiter and the icy moons.

The documentary includes interviews with (in order of appearance): Olivier Grasset, Juice interdisciplinary scientist, Luciano Iess, 3GM principal investigator, Hauke Hussmann, GALA principal investigator, Lorenzo Bruzzone, RIME principal investigator, Leonid Gurvits, PRIDE principal investigator.

Access the other episodes of 'The Making of Juice’

Credits: Produced for ESA by Lightcurve Films.

The flag of Belgium flew proudly over ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands as ESTEC was honoured with a visit by Thomas Dermine, Belgium’s State Secretary for Science Policy, Recovery Program and Strategic Investments, accompanied by new Belgian astronaut Raphaël Liégeois.

Europe has just endured its second warmest winter on record. Much of southern and western Europe has been affected by substantial anomalies of soil moisture owing to this exceptionally dry and warm winter. Data from ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission have been used to monitor the low levels of soil moisture across Europe.