Director of Science Town Hall in January

Building on the overwhelming interest in ESA's First Director of Science Town Hall, it is our pleasure to invite all members of the scientific community to the Second Director of Science Town Hall, to be held virtually on 23 January 2025 from 14:00 CET.

The Town Hall will provide an opportunity to understand the plans and priorities of the ESA Science Programme, with a particular focus on how it will continue to serve the interests of the scientific community.

Registration for the event is available on the Town Hall website. The agenda and connection details will be sent to all registrants in January.

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Call for Expressions of Interest in the L4 Payload Working Group

On 9 December, the ESA Director of Science issued a Call inviting science instrument experts affiliated with institutions in the ESA Member States to express their interest in being a member of the L4 Payload Working Group (L4PWG). This Working Group will support ESA in the definition of a Strawman payload concept and technology roadmap on payload developments for the Large (L4) mission covering the science theme "Moons of the Giant Planets".

The deadline for receipt of applications is 13 January 2025 at 12:00 (noon) CET.

L4PWG members will be appointed by end January 2025, with a planned mandate to December 2026.

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Registration for the 56th ESLAB-Euclid symposium 2025 is open

The 56th ESLAB conference will take place on 24-26 March 2025 in Leiden, the Netherlands, in conjunction with the annual Euclid Consortium meeting that is organised in parallel during that week. This time, ESLAB aims to bring together the wider scientific community with members of the Euclid Consortium to explore the diverse scientific questions that may benefit from the high-quality Euclid data, also in relation to – and with – other facilities. A particularly exciting part of the programme is devoted to results from the first public release. This quick data release (Q1) is planned for March 2025 and covers a single pass of the deep field areas for a total area of about 50 square degrees.

The conference is open to the scientific community and registration is now open.

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ESA’s Proba-3 was launched into its orbit by the Indian Space Research Organization

After a 24-hour delay of the original launch event, Proba-3 was launched from the First Launch Pad, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, India. The launch itself and the following LEOP (Launch and Early Orbit Phase) brought Proba-3 in its precise, highly elliptical orbit (600 x 60530 km): a textbook launch.

Nearly 60 scientists took the opportunity to watch the launch from Sriharikota.

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XMM-Newton Announcement of Opportunity AO-24 results

The XMM-Newton twenty-fourth Announcement of Opportunity (AO-24) closed on 11 October 2024. The accepted proposals have been announced on 12 December 2024.

462 valid proposals were received for a total of 86.3 Ms of science time, resulting in an over-subscription factor of 7.2. About 1600 scientists were involved in the proposals in total, with 381 different principal investigators from 32 countries.

A total of 36 proposals were received for Large Programmes, and 13 for Fulfil Programmes. Anticipated Target of Opportunity observations were requested in 65 proposals. For the joint programmes with NuSTAR, HST, Swift, VLT, Chandra, JWST, NRAO, and MAGIC 94 proposals were submitted.

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