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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 10-14 August 2026.

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An eclipsed Sun low in the sky over some fields. ESA astronauts Sophie Adenot and NASA's Jessica Meir pose for a portrait inside the International Space Station’s Quest airlock. Adenot was trying on a spacesuit to verify its comfort, mobility, and functionality with assistance from Meir. False-colour image of southern Norway created using Sentinel-2’s near-infrared channel. This shows vegetation in red, water bodies in dark blue and black and built-up areas in tones of grey. The Meteosat Third Generation-Imager2 (MTG-I2) satellite has begun its five-day process to load its tanks with propellant. Personnel are seen working around the spacecraft in white protective suits.
August 17, 2026 at 8:50 AM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 3-7 August 2026.
The MTG-I2 team in cleanroom at Europe’s Spaceport
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The MTG-I2 team in cleanroom at Europe’s Spaceport A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view of a spiral galaxy, with white, red and pink areas of stars and glowing gas Artemis III Crew Module and European Service Module seen connected together in cleanroom, floor signage says Forklift Prohibited. ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot on board the International Space Station using the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED), which simulates weightlifting in space.
August 9, 2026 at 7:00 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 27-31 July 2026! 👇

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As the Pacific Ocean moves into an El Niño phase, scientists are monitoring changes in sea-surface temperature, but also sea-surface salinity – which is another key indicator of this phenomenon. The image presents a snapshot of sea-surface salinity across the Pacific Ocean in June 2026, processed from observations acquired from several sources. Themis during a wet dress-rehearsal on 23 July 2026 that allowed ArianeGroup and SSC Space to practice countdown procedures and post-flight procedures. The rocket prototype was filled with liquid nitrogen at –196°C to test the whole system and see how it holds up under the extreme cold and highly-pressurised systems as well as checking if all electronic systems work correctly in these conditions. This image based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, captured on 26 July, shows the aerosol index over Spain and France, after days of wildfire spread through dry countryside. This colourful radar image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission features New Orleans and the delta of the Mississippi River, one the largest rivers in North America.
August 3, 2026 at 8:14 AM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 27 April - 1 May 2026! 👇

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A section of the original image, captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 on 21 April 2026, showing an array of vibrant colours in the tulip fields of the northern Netherlands. ESA's #ArtemisII European Service Module team at ESA ESTEC in the Netherlands, April 2026 ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot wearing a PBA – a Personal Breathing Apparatus - during emergency procedures practice on the International Space Station. A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of spiral galaxy NGC 3137, seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.
May 3, 2026 at 8:26 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 20-24 April 2026. 🧪🔭

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Close-up of Plato’s cameras SOLIS100 sleeping pods Lake Balkhash, Kazakhstan First full-size Space Rider test model assembled
April 26, 2026 at 4:41 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages, 16-20 March 2026... 👇

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One of a series of NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope images of the fragmenting comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), or K1 for short, taken over the course of three consecutive days: November 8, 9, and 10, 2025. Captured by Hubble’s STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) instrument, the sequence shows the progressive disintegration of the comet over this brief period. This is the first time Hubble has witnessed a comet so early in the process of breaking up. A Copernicus EU Sentinel-2 image captures the diverse landscape of western Norway with its jagged fjords, fertile valleys, mountain plateaus and Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe. The fourth stage for Vega-C is hoisted to the top of the rocket on the launch pad at Europe's Spaceport, 5 March 2026. The rocket is now complete and waiting for the final upper part that includes the Smile satellite to take to space on flight VV29. ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot floats inside the International Space Station while preparing for an EchoFinder session. She holds ultrasound-related equipment in both hands, surrounded by cables, laptops and scientific instruments mounted on the Station’s interior walls in microgravity.
March 22, 2026 at 10:19 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 09-13 March 2026.

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Optical Ground Station in Chile, by the Andean foothills RFA One in Saxavord Spaceport Earth from Space: Maritime highways in the Øresund Strait Plato readies for space-like tests
March 15, 2026 at 8:08 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 02-06 March 2026.

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Hubble & Euclid zoom into Cat's Eye Nebula Through the Cupola: Sophie Adenot photographs Earth from orbit Connecting the third stage of the Vega-C rocket that will take Smile to space Earth from Space: Dhaka, Bangladesh
March 8, 2026 at 3:45 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 23-27 February 2026.

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NGC 1637 (Hubble WFC3 and Webb NIRCam images) Unfolding MetOp-SG-B1’s solar wing Orbital plumbing maintenance aboard the International Space Station Earth from Space: Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica
March 1, 2026 at 5:35 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 16-20 February 2026.

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Annular solar eclipse seen from space ESA’s 5G laboratory on wheels Earth from Space: Ouarzazate, Morocco The stellar lifecycle in a nearby spiral
February 23, 2026 at 8:59 AM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 09-13 February 2026.

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Crew-12 Walkout with ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot First Ariane 6 with four boosters launched This false-colour image was processed using Sentinel-2’s near-infrared channel, which highlights vegetation in red, so that the Nile Delta and the Fayum Oasis appear in red – a red flower with a natural heart. Hubble captures light show around rapidly dying star
February 15, 2026 at 6:44 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 02-06 February 2026.

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ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot speaking with French President Emmanuel Macron With the 2026 Winter Olympics officially opening today, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission brings us a striking view of northern Italy, highlighting several key Olympic venues. This view is taken from a Mars Express flyover video of Flaugergues Crater on Mars. It shows the final scenes of the video, which culminates with a bird’s-eye view of the 240-km-wide crater itself. Technicians work at the bottom of the launch pad pm Ariane 6 flight VA267 in French Guiana, 27 January 2026. This launch will be the first to fly with four boosters, doubling liftoff thrust for the launcher, and see Ariane 6 take satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation to orbit
February 8, 2026 at 5:50 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 26-30 January 2026.

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From left to right: Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot from France.  The crew of four will launch no earlier than Wednesday 11 February from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, USA. They will travel to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, propelled into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket.   The image zooms in on Europe, as seen by the MTG-Sounder satellite from geostationary orbit, about 36 000 km from the planet’s surface. It was captured on 15 November 2025 by the satellite’s Infrared Sounder instrument, using the long-wave infrared channel, which measures Earth’s surface temperature as well as the temperature at the top of clouds. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher speaks during interactions with the media at the European Space Conference in Brussels, alongside Director of Space Transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen, Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality Dietmar Pilz, and Director of Operations Rolf Densing.  A collage of six images, showing different kinds of “anomalous” astrophysical objects. These are galaxies with unusual shapes, among them a ring-shaped galaxy, a bipolar galaxy, a group of merging galaxies, and three galaxies with warped arcs created by gravitational lensing.
February 1, 2026 at 5:03 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 19-23 January 2026.

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The Artemis II rocket has reached its launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States, ready for a historic journey. Over the weekend, engineers slowly and carefully rolled the nearly 100-metre-tall Space Launch System rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B. The 6.5-km journey took around 12 hours and was carried out using NASA’s crawler-transporter, which has been moving rockets to launch pads for over 50 years.  A closeup of a small section of the Helix Nebula, an expanding shell of gas and dust. Thousands of orange and gold comet-like pillars stream upward from the bottom, like thin liquid blown up a sheet of glass. These pillars are around the circumference of the arced shell, which forms a partial orange semi-circle at the bottom. The pillars are more numerous and denser at the bottom, and darker red. They fade to orange and then yellow in the arc. In the top two-thirds, they are thinner and more golden, and it’s easier to see the black background of space. Several bright blue stars, some with diffraction spikes, are scattered throughout. A few larger stars are on the right side. This is a gif animation made up of false-colour images taken by ESA’s Proba-3 mission and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Against a dark background, the Sun’s disc is shown in dark orange, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. A thin halo of yellow light surrounds the Sun, giving it a luminous outline against the dark background of space. This yellow outline shows the Sun’s inner corona, as captured by Proba-3. Also in yellow, three solar prominence eruptions are visible, resembling bright yellow wave-like outburst extending outwards from the Sun. First, we can see a smaller one in the top right corner, followed by a larger one in the top left and a third one in the bottom right. The whole animation lasts about 4 seconds and plays in a loop. This image, captured by Copernicus Sentinel-3 on 18 January 2026, shows clouds of smoke from wildfires on the coast of Chile.
January 25, 2026 at 5:30 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 12-16 January 2026. 🧪🔭

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This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image over the South Atlantic Ocean features a close-up view of the A23a iceberg, once the world’s largest. The unusually cloud-free image shows the first signs that the iceberg will soon disintegrate completely. Captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 on 11 January 2026, this image shows active wildfires near Lake Rivadavia in Los Alerces National Park, Argentina, observed from low Earth orbit. Our fourth European Service Module arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States, last December. This powerhouse will propel Orion and its crew safely towards the Moon and back during the Artemis IV mission, and provide them with breathable air, drinkable water, and a comfortable temperature throughout their lunar journey.  This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a full view of the Circinus galaxy, a nearby spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years away. The inset highlights a close-up from Webb of the galaxy’s core, where infrared observations pierce through dust to reveal hot material feeding its central supermassive black hole. Webb’s image, made using the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) tool on its NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) instrument, isolates hot dust in the immediate surroundings of the supermassive black hole, revealing that most of the infrared emission comes from a compact, dusty structure feeding the black hole rather than from outflowing material. In the Webb image, the inner face of the torus glows in infrared light, while the darker areas represent where the outer ring is blocking light.
January 18, 2026 at 3:45 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages, 15-19 December 2025 👇
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Ariane VA266 lift off This composite NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the debris ring and dust clouds cs1 and cs2 around the star Fomalhaut. A collage of 32 glowing discs on a black background. Each disc shows concentric rings in vivid colours: purple, orange, and yellow, with bright cyan centres. The discs vary in size and orientation, creating a striking pattern of circular and elliptical shapes. A spiral galaxy seen nearly edge-on. Its disk is filled with red and blue lights from star-forming nebulae and clusters of hot stars, respectively, as well as thick dark clouds of dust that block the strong white light from its centre. A faint, glowing halo of gas surrounds the disc, fading into the black background. A bluish plume of gas also extends from the galaxy’s core to the lower-right of the image.
December 21, 2025 at 6:55 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 08-12 December 2025.

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XMM-Newton sees comet 3I/ATLAS in X-ray light Galileo satellites mounted on Ariane 6 dispenser A sunlight lamp illuminates a satellite model covered in golden thermal insulation. A cup-shaped thruster extends from the model’s centre, reflecting a rainbow of colours. A few metres to the left, not captured in this image, a camera is brought closer and closer to the model, scanning the scene in this simulation of a rendezvous in space. This glittering blue galaxy and subject of today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week is a blue compact dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). This galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (The Great Bear).
December 14, 2025 at 6:20 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 01-05 December.

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Hubble reobserves 3I/ATLAS This close-up image shows a part of the mechanism that will swing the ramps open on the Red Planet.   Severe flooding in Sumatra, Indonesia Galileo satellite integration on the newly developed Ariane 6 dispenser at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
December 7, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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📸 This was our #WeekInImages 24-28 November

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ESA directors at Ministerial Council in Bremen Earth radiance measured by Sentinel-5A Gigantic cloud of cold hydrogen gas called N159 Bremen, Germany by Sentinel-1D
November 30, 2025 at 7:59 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 17-21 November 2025 👇

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Sentinel-6B launched on 17 November 2025. This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared image shows four coiled shells of dust around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep for the first time. Previous observations by other telescopes showed only one. Galileo ‘fit check’ This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s image reveals CANUCS-LRD-z8.6, it is part of a class of small, very distant and strikingly red galaxies called Little Red Dots (LRDs), which have been spotted in increasing numbers by Webb’s surveys of the early Universe.
November 23, 2025 at 7:36 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 10-14 November 2025 👇
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3D-printed space metal under microscope The backbone of ESA's fourth European Service Module ESA medical doctors Nina Purvis and Sarah Gaier meet in Antarctica at the coastal station Mario Zuchelli The patterns of Coloe Fossae: what a martian ice age left behind
November 16, 2025 at 6:32 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 03-07 November2025 👇

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November 9, 2025 at 7:24 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 27-31 October 2025 👇
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Four Arianespace technicians monitor the Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite being encapsulated inside the Ariane 6 rocket fairing. Members of ESA’s astronaut reserve Carmen Possnig, Meganne Christian, Anthea Comellini and Arnaud Prost in full training gear during a fire emergency drill. This image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on 26 October 2025 shows the ‘brightness temperature’ at the top of Hurricane Melissa as it moved through the Caribbean Sea towards Jamaica, where it was expected to make landfall. Part of the Red Spider planetary nebula: the nebula’s central star is hidden by a blotchy pinkish cloud of dust. A strong red light radiates from this area, illuminating the nearby dust.
November 2, 2025 at 7:03 PM
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📷 This was our #WeekInImages 13-17 October 2025 👇

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ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti seen here during a helicopter training course with the German Bundeswehr, Germany's federal defence forces. She participated in a three-week training programme at the International Helicopter Training Centre in Bückeburg, Germany. The San Rafael glacier, top of image, is one of the most actively calving glaciers in the world. It calves west towards the Pacific Ocean and into an arc-shaped lake, Laguna San Rafael, visible directly to the left of the glacier. Latest results from the ESA’s Swarm satellite constellation highlight the dynamic nature of Earth’s magnetism. In the northern hemisphere there are two areas where the magnetic field is particularly strong – one around Canada and the other around Siberia. Since the launch of Swarm in 2013 the Canadian strong field region on the left has decreased while the Siberian strong field region on the right has increased. A spiral galaxy featuring a bright, glowing core that is crossed by a horizontal bar of yellowish light. Spiral arms emerge from each end of this bar and wrap around it, creating a disc that is stretched out to the right. Some areas, mostly along the arms, glow pink where stars are forming in nebulae. Webs of dark reddish dust also follow the arms.
October 19, 2025 at 4:02 PM