Call for ESA Research Fellowships in Space Science is now open!
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Call for Applications for the ESA Research Fellowships in Space Science.
Our postdoctoral fellowships offer early-career scientists from ESA states the possibility to carry out independent research in heliophysics, planetary science, astrophysics, and fundamental physics. The fellowships can be taken at ESAC near Madrid, Spain, at ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, or at ESA Office at STScI in Baltimore, USA. Applicants should have completed their PhD or be able to complete it before taking up the fellowship starting in fall 2026.
The deadline for applications is 22 September 2025. Please visit the fellowship website for more information about the fellowship, the application process and the current and past fellows as well as a link to the application portal.
Call for Expressions of Interest to become Member of the AWG/SSEWG and/or SSAC
ESA's science advisory structure is the main channel for ensuring an efficient relationship between ESA and the scientific community in Europe and is an essential element for the good conduct of the Agency's scientific objectives.
The Director of Science recently issued a call to invite scientists affiliated with institutions in the ESA Member States to express their interest to become members of Space Science Advisory Committee (SSAC), the Astronomy Working Group (AWG), and the Solar System and Exploration Working Group (SSEWG).
The goal is to update a pool of potential candidates to be considered in future years to replace members completing their mandate, guaranteeing proper discipline balance and various diversity criteria in the composition of the SSAC, AWG, and SSEWG.
The deadline is 3 September 2025 at 12:00 (noon) CET.
XMM-Newton Twenty-Fifth Announcement of Opportunity (AO-25)
The scientific community is invited to respond to the twenty-fifth "Announcement of Opportunity" to submit proposals for observations to be performed with the XMM-Newton observatory. This announcement solicits proposals to be carried out between May 2026 and April 2027. Proposers from institutes located worldwide are welcome to participate. All proposals will be subject to peer review by the XMM-Newton Observing Time Allocation Committee.
The detailed schedule of milestones of the announcement, the required software tools and the documentation are available on the AO-25 website.
The deadline for XMM-Newton AO-25 proposal submission is Friday 10 October 2025, 12:00 UT.
MMX Announcement of Opportunity for a Member of the Science Board
The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is a JAXA-led mission that will fly to Phobos and Deimos, and will sample > 10 g of material from the surface of Phobos for return to Earth. It builds on the technical and operational experience that JAXA has developed in the field of sample return from small bodies with the Hayabusa missions. The MMX mission is planned to be launched in October 2026.
Through this Announcement of Opportunity (AO) the European Space Agency (ESA) solicits proposals for membership of the MMX mission Science Board, a high-level team of scientists responsible for the overall science management of the MMX mission.
Proposals are due by 16 September 2025, 12:00 (noon) CEST.
Vacancy: Science Operations System Engineer in the Navigation Science Operations section - advance notice
ESA's Directorate of Science will soon open a System Engineer position for the Navigation Science Operations Center, based at ESAC in Spain. In this role, the System Engineer will be responsible for the designing, developing and implementing science operations supporting Navigation space missions such as Galileo, GENESIS and others. With its GNSS Science Archive, the Navigation Science Operations Center integrates all available data sources to foster research in Navigation science in Europe. The System Engineer will work closely with colleagues in the Directorates of Navigation and of Operations, and with the European Science Data Center team at ESAC. The official announcement will appear on ESA's career website.
Vacancy: Science Operations System Engineer in the Euclid Science Operation Center – advance notice
ESA's Directorate of Science will soon open a System Engineer position in the Euclid Science Operation Centre, based at ESAC in Spain. Launched in July 2023, the ESA Euclid mission is exploring the nature, composition and evolution of our Dark Universe, through an unprecedented high-resolution survey yielding more than 20PB of scientific data products over the next 7 years. As a system engineer with experience and passion for the challenge of astronomical data analysis in the era of big data, the successful applicant will support the Euclid Mission Manager with the implementation of the Euclid Data Space project, aiming to provide the scientific community with an integrated tool suite to access, explore and analyse Euclid data. The official announcement will appear on ESA's career website.
On 3 July 2025, the Board of the In-Orbit Commissioning Review officially declared Proba-3 operational, marking the start of its nominal mission phase. The mission is planned to run for 24 months from its launch date on 5 December 2024.
Both scientific instruments onboard - DARA and ASPIICS - are performing exceptionally well and have begun acquiring data:
- DARA (Davos Absolute Radiometer), provided and operated by the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos, Switzerland, measures the Total Solar Irradiance with high precision.
- ASPIICS (Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun), a coronagraph developed by Centre Spatial de Liège, Belgium, is operated by the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels.
During the meeting, ESA's Directorate of Science will be present with several dedicated talks, as well as co-organizing sessions on missions in ESA's solar system fleet. Throughout the week, there will be a series of presentations, workshops, and discussions in a dedicated ESA room focused on engaging with the community, addressing the needs of early career researchers, and providing support for our missions.
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.
The Solar Orbiter mission has acquired invaluable datasets dedicated to the study of e.g. the Sun's atmosphere, transient events, and the solar wind, with data acquired by other space missions and ground-based observatories. This hackathon provides an opportunity to analyse these data and is aimed at early career researchers. 20 participants will be selected to work in 5 teams lead by mentors.
This conference is the seventh meeting in the "The X-ray Universe" series, aimed at encompassing a broad range of high-energy astrophysics topics, from solar system studies to cosmology. It will provide a showcase for results and discoveries from XMM-Newton and other missions, discussing as well the scientific potential of future missions and the evolution of the scientific analysis landscape.
European Space Agency, D/SCI Directorate of Science
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