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Following a short period in storage after arriving at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, the MetOp Second Generation-B1 satellite has been transferred to a cleanroom and removed from its transport container. The team is now preparing to reactivate this ‘sleeping beauty, and begin the final checks and preparations ahead of its launch, planned towards the end of the year.

Hera, the European Space Agency’s first mission for planetary defence, arrives at its target body during November, with the goal of gathering precious data on the kinetic impact method of asteroid deflection – while also solving various scientific enigmas.

The small-car-sized spacecraft is headed to the 151-m-diameter Dimorphos asteroid, which orbits in turn around its 780-m Didymos parent. Dimorphos is already historic as the first object in the Solar System to have had its orbit changed by human action – when NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted it on 26 September 2022.

DART’s impact caused a brightening visible from distant Earth telescopes, but nobody knows what it did to Dimorphos itself. Hera is going there to perform a close-up crash site survey, to help turn DART’s kinetic impact experiment into a well understood planetary defence deflection technique.

Scientists are hoping for bonus science as well. Past spacecraft close encounters have revealed asteroids to be dynamic environments with complex histories – and many outstanding questions still to be answered. Here are 10 asteroid mysteries that Hera will explore.

Read more.

Despite it being a complex operation, ERMIS-3, an 8U CubeSat developed by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, has established a link with an optical ground station marking an important step in validating optical communications on small satellites. The demonstration, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and achieved using optical terminals developed by Lithuanian company Astrolight, happened only weeks after the satellite’s commissioning. 

October was a month of discoveries and milestones. ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover team trained in Spain’s desert, preparing for Mars. Our Smile mission captured the full ring of northern lights around Earth, while Mars Express uncovered new clues about a giant Martian cloud. ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot returned to Earth after 237 days in space, and Hera captured its first images of the asteroids it will study to help protect our planet. Meanwhile, ESA welcomed thousands of visitors for Open Days and teamed up with Pokémon to bring space science to new audiences.

Here’s a look at what space had in store for Europe this October.

Week in images: 26-30 October 2026

Discover our week through the lens

The NASA/ESA Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescopes recently stared at an eerie star-forming scene within the Carina Nebula, a massive gas and dust cloud located approximately 7500 light-years away from Earth. The two telescopes offer complementary views of the shadowy form, nicknamed the Cat’s Head Nebula, which reflects the 'magical'' process of star formation. Hubble’s visible-light view shows the cat as a dark, elongated dust pillar and hints of young forming stars, while Webb’s infrared-light imagery unveils many stars and other hidden details.

The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft for planetary defence has resolved its two target asteroids separately for the very first time, revealing the binary nature of the Didymos system, currently some 197 million km away from Earth.