Call for Medium and Fast missions to be issued on 19 March 2025
The next Call for Medium (M8) and Fast (F3) mission opportunities will be issued on 19 March 2025.
The Call documentation, including a technical annex, will provide details of the programmatic context, boundary conditions (for example, payload provision, cost and schedule, mission profiles, international collaboration), as well as outlines of the two-phase submission process and the timeline for proposal endorsement by funding agencies.
Preliminary information concerning this Call can be found in the recording of the briefing meeting held on 11 December, the presentation files, and the Q&A from the meeting, which are available at the Call website.
Exploratory Call for mini-Fast mission proposals to be issued on 19 March 2025
An exploratory Call for a new type of agile mission in the ESA Science Programme - mini-Fast missions - will be issued on 19 March 2025.
The purpose of this Call is to probe the interest in and feasibility of mini-Fast missions, which could address science objectives implementable in a period of less than five years (from Phase 0 to launch). Such missions could benefit the Science Programme by allowing higher involvement and visibility for many Member States, opening opportunities for new communities, increasing the cadence of missions, and investigating new implementation schemes.
Preliminary information concerning this exploratory Call can be found in the recording of the briefing meeting held on 11 December, the presentation files, and the Q&A from the meeting, which are available online.
On 28 January 2025, ESA’s Envision mission reached a further important milestone when ESA’s Director of Science Prof. Carole Mundell and CEO of Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I) Giampiero Di Paolo co-signed the contract to build the Envision spacecraft. The signature took place during the 17th European Space Conference in Brussels, Belgium, in the presence of ESA’s Director General Joseph Aschbacher, ESA’s Envision Project Manager Anne Pacros and the TAS-I Envision Project Manager Laura Costanza.
Envision will map Venus from its inner core to its upper atmosphere, addressing why Venus and Earth evolved so differently.
ESA welcomes applications from scientists interested in pursuing research projects based on data publicly available in the ESA Space Science Archives.
The ESA Archival Research Visitor Programme is open to scientists affiliated with institutes in ESA Member States and Collaborating States. We will also consider strong applications from outside those states. Early-career scientists including students are particularly encouraged to apply, and so are women and minorities. Research projects can be carried out at ESAC and at ESTEC. Visits last typically 1-3 months. ESA covers travel costs and provides support for lodging expenses and meals. The evaluation process is anonymised to ensure equal opportunities for all applicants.
XRISM Guest Observers Cycle 2 Announcement of Opportunity
The ESA Director of Science invites the scientific community to respond to the 2nd ESA “Announcement of Opportunity” to submit Guest Observer proposals for observations to be performed with X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), a JAXA/NASA mission with ESA participation.
This Announcement solicits proposals for observations to be carried out between November 2025 and May 2026. Potential proposers are expected to prepare and submit proposals in electronic form by 15 May 2025. The final approved observational program will be available by 30 September 2025 and the Cycle 2 Guest Observer observations will start on 1 November 2025.
Save the date for Cheops Guest Observers 6th Announcement of Opportunity
ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops) mission foresees its 6th Announcement of Opportunity for Guest Observer proposals (AO-6) to open on the 18 March 2025 (12:00 CET) and close on the 8 May 2025 (12:00 CEST).
Live hands-on tutorials will be run in March and April 2025 to guide prospective proposers through the proposal preparation and submission process. Registration is required to attend or watch the recordings of the tutorials.
ESA's Directorate of Science will soon be looking for a Project Scientist and Science Operations Scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), to be based at the ESA Office at STScI.
In this role, their primary objective will be to the scientific return from the mission throughout all phases, collaborating closely with the Science Operations Development Division at ESA to propose and identify science operations concepts that support the European scientific community, particularly identifying synergies with Euclid and other ESA missions. They will also participate in the activities of the Roman science operations facility at STScI.
The opportunity will be published on the ESA careers webpage
A new version of the European Hubble Space Telescope (eHST) Science Archive has been released. Building on the long-standing NASA/ESA partnership on Hubble, eHST provides a European mirror of Hubble data from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). This enables easy cross-matching, metadata filtering and visualization of data from other ESA missions with an integrated ESASky.
The major update is full integration of the Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV) Explorer, which is a visualization tool to investigate variable objects in Hubble’s rich archive and to display their location and light curves. The HCV was first released in 2019 from a project led by the National Observatory of Athens, and sponsored by ESA in collaboration with STScI.
The ESA XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre (SOC), together with partners at NASA, will host a virtual Data Analysis Workshop on 1–3 April 2025.
This workshop will highlight the scientific studies enabled by XMM-Newton and present the newly released Science Analysis Software (SAS) v22. It will also introduce beginners and experienced users alike to SciServer and Datalabs, in particular the XMM-Newton tools created for use on both platforms, which focus on making data reduction more accessible regardless of computing resources and expertise available at a given institution.
The workshop will be split between presentations and hands-on sessions timed to allow participants in different parts of the world to attend at convenient times.
The ESLAB Euclid Symposium 2025 will focus on Euclid science and on the upcoming Euclid quick data release, including a preview of the deep field areas, which is planned for March 2025. A special session will be devoted to the description of the Euclid data and first scientific results.
The goal of the workshop is to improve the accessibility and usability of XMM data and its data reduction and analysis software, and to introduce the tools created for use with SciServer and Datalabs, which focus on making data reduction more accessible regardless of computing resources and expertise available at a given institution.
This conference in the honour of the 25th anniversary of the launch of XMM-Newton will focus on currently exciting XMM-Newton science, synergies between XMM-Newton and other missions, and implications for the future. Those new to the field of X-ray astronomy are especially encouraged to attend. The conference will not have a registration fee.
Extreme-variability, often repeating phenomena associated with supermassive black holes including tidal disruption events, quasi-periodic eruptions, and changing-look AGN are observed with increasing frequency. This workshop will provide an environment where observers and theorists can together advance our understanding of the dynamic and complex environments which exist in galactic nuclei.
During two dedicated lunch sessions, ESA's Science Directorate will present an overview over its programme aimed at early career researches and update the European space science community on the services, tools, and assets offered by the ESA Space Science Archives.
The ML-Helio conference will focus on data science techniques to tackle fundamental problems in space weather forecasting, automatic event identification, feature detection and tracking, as well as combination of physics-based models with ML techniques. It will consist of lectures, complemented by hands-on tutorials on Python tools and data resources available to the heliophysics machine learning community.
The first XRISM International Conference 2025 will be held on October 20-24, 2025, at “Kyoto Terrsa” in Kyoto, Japan: “Opening a new era of the Dynamic Universe”. This conference will highlight the scientific achievements from the first two years of XRISM and identify key questions we should address in the next observation cycles.
European Space Agency, D/SCI Directorate of Science
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