Euclid opens data treasure trove, and offers glimpse of deep fields
On 19 March 2025, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission released its first survey data, including a preview of its deep fields. In these 63 deg2, Euclid already spotted 26 million galaxies, up to 10.5 billion light-years away. Data can be accessed via the ESA Euclid Science Archive and ESA Datalabs for a total of 35TB. Images of the deep fields are available in high resolution on ESAsky for you to dive in. Scientists from the Euclid Consortium have submitted 27 scientific papers exploring strong lensing systems, galaxy morphology, galaxy clusters and a hint of the cosmic web to scientific journals. The complex data processing is described in 7 reference papers. This achievement is the result of intense work from ESA teams and the Euclid Consortium. The next cosmology release is planned for the end of 2026.
The Call for a Medium-size and a Fast mission opportunity has been issued on 19 March 2025.
Proposals covering any science theme and topic are solicited, with a ceiling to the mission’s cost to ESA of 670M€ for the Medium-size mission and 205M€ for the Fast mission. The Call documentation, including a technical annex, provides details of the programmatic context, boundary conditions (for example, payload provision, cost and schedule, mission profiles, international collaboration), as well as a description of the two-phase submission process and the timeline for proposal endorsement by funding agencies.
The deadline for receipt of Step-1 proposals is 12:00 (noon) CEST on 21 May 2025.
Exploratory Call for mini-Fast mission proposals issued
An exploratory Call for a new type of agile mission in the ESA Science Programme - mini-Fast missions - has been issued on 19 March 2025.
The purpose of this Call is to assess the potential of mini-Fast missions to benefit the Science Programme by increasing the Programme diversity; supporting the development of the European science and technology communities, in particular the next generation of professionals; increasing the cadence of mission launches; adding a new agile Programme element to implement space science missions in less than 5 years from selection to launch; and investigating new implementation schemes. Proposals covering any science theme and topic are solicited, with a ceiling to the mission’s cost to ESA of 50M€.
The deadline for receipt of proposals is 12:00 (noon) CEST on 21 May 2025.
The 6th Cheops Guest Observers Announcement of Opportunity is now open. The selected proposals will be part of the observing cycle from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. This period marks the last year of the first mission extension of Cheops.
The AO-6 Call and the discretionary programme are open to the worldwide scientific community, regardless of nationality or institutional affiliation. Undergraduate students and PhD candidates are eligible if it is guaranteed that their supervisor can provide sufficient guidance throughout the proposal. Proposers may request as much time as scientifically needed in a single proposal. Large observing programmes which will produce high-value datasets are encouraged.
The AO-6 Call is foreseen to close on the 8 May 2025 at 12:00 CEST.
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.
The Gaia spacecraft was switched off on 27 March 2025.
After ending its scientific observations earlier this year, the Gaia spacecraft was transferred to its final orbit around the Sun. During a commemorative event, it was permanently switched off from ESA’s Mission Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.
Over its lifetime, the Gaia spacecraft secured a treasure trove of 10.5 years of science data that has and will continue to transform astronomy. Information on the fourth Gaia data release planned in 2026 can be found on the Gaia Cosmos pages. The fifth and final Gaia data release is planned for the end of the decade.
First public release of the Integral Science Legacy Archive (ISLA)
On 27 March 2025, the first public version of the Integral Science Legacy Archive (ISLA) was released. It provides access to all consolidated raw data as well as high level products like time series, spectra, and mosaics. The products currently available in ISLA were produced by the Integral Data Science Centre (ISDC) in Geneva and will gradually be reprocessed during the post-operations phase. In addition, a community portal allows scientists to promote their own science products and make them accessible to the community.
IRIS Call for Science Planners AO#11 - advance notice
NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is a Small Explorer (SMEX) mission that allows scientists to trace the flow of solar energy and plasma up through its atmosphere from the visible surface into the dynamic corona. IRIS has simultaneous spectroscopy and imaging to investigate the radiation, dynamics and spatial structure of the Sun's atmosphere in detail.
Since 2015, by agreement with NASA, ESA facilitates scientists working in its Member States to be trained and to act as science planners for IRIS, allowing them to learn the process of planning and to get access to time to run their own experiments with the mission. ESA's 11th announcement of opportunity is expected to be issued soon and the heliophysics community is encouraged to submit their proposals.
BepiColombo Call for Interdisciplinary Scientist and Guest Investigators - advance notice
BepiColombo is a joint mission by ESA and JAXA to study Mercury, consisting of two orbiters: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. Launched on 20 October 2018, it will arrive at Mercury in November 2026, with science operations starting in early 2027.
ESA, JAXA, and NASA will appoint up to 11 Guest Investigators and one Interdisciplinary Scientist. Guest Investigators will use data from instruments, sensors, or tracking data, combined with other missions, observations, lab measurements, or models. The Interdisciplinary Scientist will join the Science Working Team to focus on overall science objectives and cross-fertilization between payloads.
An announcement of opportunity will be issued soon for the Mercury scientific community to submit proposals.
The planned key milestones for the twenty-fifth XMM-Newton "Announcement of Opportunity" have been established with a planned due date for proposal submission 10 October 2025 (12:00 UT).
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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