wire - news in brief

ClearSpace, a spin-off of EPFL's Space Center (eSpace), has been selected to lead a major European Space Agency (ESA) space debris de-orbiting project with a total budget topping €100 million.

The space telescope CHEOPS is scheduled to begin its journey into space on Tuesday, December 17th on board a Soyuz rocket from the European Space Agency (ESA) in Kourou, French Guiana.

The space telescope CHEOPS is scheduled to begin its journey into space on Tuesday, December 17th on board a Soyuz rocket from the European Space Agency (ESA) in Kourou, French Guiana.

On 27 and 28 November 2019, State Secretary Martina Hirayama attended the European Space Agency's ESA Ministerial Council meeting in Seville ("Space 19+").

The crew of the International Space Station has taken delivery of a haptic interface designed by EPFL spin-off Force Dimension. Astronauts could one day use the device, based on the famous delta robot developed at EPFL by Reymond Clavel, to control unmanned Martian and lunar rovers from afar. In a project called METERON, the European Space Agency (ESA) is exploring how advanced robots could be used to repair satellites in orbit or probe hostile environments like the Martian and lunar surfaces.

For the time being, the Swiss space telescope CHEOPS is scheduled to begin its journey into space in mid-December on board a Soyuz rocket from the European Space Agency (ESA) in Kourou, French Guiana.

The first-ever image of a black hole was unveiled to the public this past April. It was produced by a team of 200 scientists as part of the Event Horizon Telescope Project.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), is a US-led project that will measure the accelerated expansion of the Universe in order to reveal the nature of dark energy. The DESI project, which has received significant contributions from EPFL's astrophysicists, is entering its final testing phase, gearing up to charter the skies.

Things are changing in outer space: it is filling with debris, attracting private companies, and raising new technological challenges.

The tiny Swiss satellite, launched in September 2009, is still working. The fact that it has lasted so long is a testament to the skills of the students who built it.

On 17 June, students from EPFL and 12 other European universities headed to Zermatt as part of the IGLUNA project.

Components for ESA rockets are illuminated with neutrons Rockets from the European Space Agency ESA fly into space with support from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI. Imaging carried out at PSI in cooperation with Dassault Aviation ensures the quality of certain components of the Ariane 5 and Vega launch vehicles.

At the end of June, the University of Bern is holding a diverse science festival to mark the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing: a multimedia show on Bundesplatz will display milest

The State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation, Martina Hirayama, participated to the 'Space Council' of ESA and EU member states in Brussels today.

Sending manned missions to Mars is essential, according to Pierre Brisson, the president of Mars Society Switzerland, "because we can." We spoke with him about this challenge while he was at EPFL recently to give a talk. Pierre Brisson, a planetology enthusiast who heads the Swiss chapter of the Mars Society, believes in the need to send people to Mars.

In cooperation with Empa, the Austrian Space Forum (ÖFW) is developing the "Serenity" space suit - a prototype for a Mars suit.

Engineers working on the CleanSpace One project at EPFL's Space Center have come up with a way of capturing and destroying the space debris that has built up over 60 years of low-orbit activities. That team has now founded a startup, ClearSpace, to further develop and market the technology. Since 2012, engineers at EPFL's Space Center have been hard at work on a new junk-clearing satellite to capture debris orbiting the earth.

Another European Space Agency (ESA) satellite was launched last October: BepiColombo who is heading for Mercury - with Empa technology on board.

Three years ago, on 14 March 2016, the Bernese Mars camera CaSSIS started its journey to Mars with the "ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter" spacecraft.

On September 30, 2016, the active phase of the ESA's Rosetta mission came to an end with the controlled crash landing of the probe on the surface of the comet Chury.

The Affinity Map showing cross-laboratory collaboration among faculty at EPFL's School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) is now available to the general public. One of its creators will soon be heading off to MIT on a grant to expand his idea to a global scale. Scientists around the world are excited about the new possibilities being offered by advanced data collection and processing methods.

Bern, 20. On 21 August 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the scientific Earth observation mission Aeolus. The aim of the mission is the global mapping of wind profiles in the atmosphere. These observations, together with information about aerosols and clouds, contribute to an improved understanding of the dynamic processes in the atmosphere and are of great importance for weather forecasting.

This year the newly opened Innovation Park Zurich repurposed old hangars on the military airfield in Dübendorf into office space, creating a novel combination of airfield and laboratory. This site is now where the UZH Space Hub carries out joint research projects of the University of Zurich and its partners from air and space travel.

Physics isn't everyone's favourite subject. At the iLab of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, students experience the material in a different way: with experiments instead of memorising formulas.

The Mars camera CaSSIS on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has returned its first colour images of the red planet.

Construction of the space telescope CHEOPS is finished. The engineers from the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern will package the instrument this week and send it to Madrid, where it will be integrated on the satellite platform.

Astronomers have examined the distribution and movement of dwarf galaxies in the constellation Centaurus, but their observations do not fit with the standard model of cosmology that assumes the existence of dark matter. The international team of researchers led by the University of Basel reported their findings .

Just 25 years ago, Vaud astronaut Claude Nicollier boarded the Space Shuttle Atlantis for the first of what would be four missions in space.

ETH Zurich is launching an administrative enquiry into allegations made in the Department of Physics.

The observation of gravitational waves last year captivated professionals in the field. Experts, including at ETH Zurich, expected that this discovery would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Media releases, information for representatives of the media Media Relations (E) This year, the University of Bern celebrates 50 years of space exploration.

EPFL's physicists are moving forward in their efforts to solve the mysteries of the universe. A particle detector made up of 10,000 kilometers of scintillating fiber is under construction and will be added onto CERN's particle accelerator.

Lavinia Heisenberg is a theoretical physicist. She is reluctant to accept that General Relativity can be used to describe the universe only on the assumption of exotic materials and energy sources.

Media releases, information for representatives of the media Media Relations (E) PLATO, the largest European exoplanet research mission, was adopted on 20 June 2017 by the European Space Agency at the ESA Scientific Programs Committee meeting. The Universities of Bern and Geneva are heavily involved in this mission, which should enable astronomers to discover and characterize planets the size of the Earth and the "super 'Earths" that orbit around solar type stars in their habitable zone.

Media releases, information for representatives of the media Media Relations (E) After 60 hours of non-stop work, researchers at the University of Bern being part of an international team reached their hoped-for goal: They were the first to measure the orbital period for the outermost planet of the famous TRAPPIST-1 system which made headlines worldwide.

Dark matter is one of the basic constituents of the Universe, five times more abundant than ordinary matter.

Watching Star Trek as a child first inspired Judit Szulágyi's fascination with planets and galaxies.

CERN's CMS experiment - one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider received a new heart today - a pixel detector much like a high-speed digital camera that snaps images up to 40 million times per second. Earlier today, physicists and engineers at CERN replaced the heart of the Compact Muon Solenoid ( CMS ) experiment, one of the two general purpose particle physics detectors that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.