We had a talk yesterday from Dr. Fabio Favata titled “Space Astronomy in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan”. Cosmic Vision is the European Space Agency’s peculiar name for its plan over the next decade and a bit. The talk was very good, and covered almost the whole breadth of ESA’s big activities that are either currently running or up-and-coming.

So where is ESA right now? Currently ESA is supporting or in some way dealing with about a dozen missions in operation. Between now and 2015, ESA has 8 more spacecraft due to launch. In this post I will briefly overview those upcoming launches. In my next post, I shall discuss the future beyond 2015.

This year will see three payloads put into orbit: Chandryaan, Herschel and Planck. Chandrayaan is an unmanned lunar mission in association with the Indian Space Agency. Herschel and Planck are ESA endeavours and Herschel particularly is seen as a flagship mission. Herschel will be a big step forward technologically and will usher in a lot of Far Infrared data for people like me in the area of star formation, and indeed for anyone else who likes to look at fairly cold, dusty things.

2010 will see something called Microscope go up. This is an experiment to test Einstein’s equivalence principle, which is a key postulate in the characterization of space-time and the theory of gravitation. 2010 also sees the LISA Pathfinder mission launch, which will test the viability of LISA, a much talked about gravity wave experiment which always seems to be 5 years away.

In 2011, GAIA, another flagship mission will be sent up to measure the precise distances and velocities of a billion stars. It will track the motions of stars down to 10-20 microarcseconds and a magnitude down to 15. This mission will revolutionise the way we model our galaxy, as we will begin to see how the stars that make it up are moving about.

In 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch, which is seen by many as the successor to Hubble although it will really be looking at non-visible wavelengths. Also in 2013 is the wonderfully named BepiColombo, a Mercury mission which will also test the theory of relativity.

Finally in 2015, ESA will launch the Solar Orbiter which will produce images of the Sun at an unprecedented resolution and perform closest ever in-situ measurements.

You can find out more about any of these mission at ESA’s website.

Hello and welcome to the 40th Carnival of Space! I thought I’d add a bit of javascript into my page for a change - it’s the HTML equivalent of a mid-life crisis for the Carnival which is now at its 40th gathering. Congrats to the Carnival and all those involved.

Now let’s get on with the material. There are some great oddities this week, including an anecdote regarding Willie Nelson. Batman is involved, too. This is my first time hosting the carnival, so I hope you all like it.

In case your browser won’t accept javascript, here are this weeks posts presented in the usual format.

Astroprof has two stories on Mercury: one on the Caloris Basin and one on weird terrain.

Cumbrian sky has a post about coming home.

APOD is featuring a great montage of Comet Holmes.

Chris Lintott talks about getting your bearings in a post from Hawaii.

Collectspace is featuring a lovely tale of what I’d call a spatial confluence of events.

Wanna know how to make a black hole? Starts with a bang is going to try and tell you. Or you can read about Batman.

Next Big Future has a post on SpaceX and the progess they are making toward Falcon 9.Link

Astropixie writes about some major NASA events that happened during this week over the years.

Visual Astronomy is thinking about Asteroid 2007 TU24. Have we learned anything?

Sorting Out Science is sorting out the history of Explorer 1.

Another Explorer posting from A Babe in the Universe.

A Mars Odyessy discusses a pretty advanced version of a gripper.

From Music of the Spheres, a post about a 4 percent chance…

Hobby Space has two posts both about Bieglow’s recent activities

Got 100 years to spare? Centauri Dreams has something you can do with your time.

Political Action for Space wants your help (if you’re American).

Orbiting Frog (me) has some lovely wallpapers to share with you all.

New Frontiers has some more on SpaceX and space fashion.

Read More about the Carnival and how to get involved at Universe Today.

The MESSENGER spacecraft flew past Mercury on Monday evening in one of three scheduled slow-down fly-bys before it begins orbiting the planet in a few years. The first images (there are going to be a LOT of them) will now begin to appear. This image from a press release out last night, shows the previously hidden face of the planet.

It doesn’t get more impressive that this. People get into this field so they can be part of these kinds of photographs. What you see is the never-before-photographed side of the planet Mercury.

On the upper right is the giant Caloris basin, including its western portions never before seen by spacecraft. Formed by the impact of a large asteroid or comet, Caloris is one of the largest, and perhaps one of the youngest, basins in the Solar System.

When Mariner 10 visited the planet 30 years ago, part of it (slightly more than one half) was hidden from view and never pictured. Thus, since then all maps of Mercury, like the one below, have contained a mysterious, blurry hemisphere on one side. But no more!

The new image was taken using the Mercury Dual Imaging System’s (MDIS) wide field camera, and it shows features down to a size of 6 miles across. It was taken at a distance of 17,000 miles from the planet.

Other images yet to be released from this fly-by, will show the surface in colour and higher resolution.

Read the full press release here.

Today at 1904 GMT, the NASA spacecraft Messenger will make its first approach of Mercury, the inner-most planet of our solar system. This evening’s approach is the first of three between now and 2011, designed to slow down the probe as it readies to begin orbiting the planet.

This will be the first visit to Mercury by any probe since 1975. More than 1,300 images of Mercury will taken during this encounter, so hopefully we can expect some great pictures to be released over the next couple of weeks.

If you want to read more about the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging spacecraf, then you can visit either the general NASA mission page or a more detailed page from the instrumentation team.

This mission is a very exciting one. Mercury remains one of the only planets to have not been fully mapped by probes (you may have seen the bald patch on many globes of the planet). There are a lot of people getting very excited today!