Announcements 2023

To celebrate another year of exciting images and discoveries from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and the completion of the first year of science operations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb have released a new calendar for 2024 that showcases beautiful imagery from both missions. The 2024 calendar features a selection of images from Press Releases (from Hubble and Webb), Hubble Pictures of the Week and Webb Pictures of the Month published throughout 2023. These include imagery of planets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy (please see the links provided below). The images featured in the calendar are as follows: Cover: The subject of the first anniversary image from the James Webb Space Telescope is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, …

A special Announcement of Opportunity (AO) is soliciting the participation of the European community in the role of ESA-appointed representatives to the NASA Great Observatory Maturation Program’s (GOMAP) Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission. The 2020 National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics (Astro2020) recommended a "Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program" as its highest priority in Enabling Programs for Space. Astro2020 further recommended that the first mission to enter the maturation program be an infrared-optical-ultraviolet (IR/Optical/UV) space telescope. In response to these recommendations, NASA has established the Great Observatory Maturation Program (GOMAP). Consistent with the guidance from Astro2020, the first entrant into GOMAP will be the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a space-based IR/Optical/UV telescope. As part of GOMAP, NASA will form and coordinate a series of groups whose collective activities will perform and document analyses that advance HWO's …

- By Chris Evans, Mark McCaughrean, Sandor Kruk, and Sam Pearson - New images of the Orion Nebula from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have been included in ESA’s ESASky application, which has a user-friendly interface to visualise and download astronomical data. One of the brightest nebulae in the night sky is Messier 42, the Orion Nebula, located south of Orion’s belt. At its core is the young Trapezium Cluster of stars, the most massive of which illuminate the surrounding gas and dust with their intense ultraviolet radiation fields, while protostars continue to form today in the OMC-1 molecular cloud behind. The nebula is a treasure trove for astronomers studying the formation and early evolution of stars, with a rich diversity of phenomena and objects, including: outflows and planet-forming disks around young stars; embedded protostars; brown dwarfs; free-floating planetary mass objects; and photodissociation regions – the interface regions where …