About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Highlights
Latest
Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Spain
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Norway
The Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Czechia
Romania
United Kingdom
Slovenia
Sweden
Switzerland
Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicAstronauts
Latest
Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicLatest
'Polar-sitting' orbit
Tomorrow’s orbit today? This image shows how a large solar sail-equipped satellite could partly offset Earth’s and the Sun’s gravity with the slight but steady pressure of sunlight to hover above the Arctic or Antarctic, enabling continuous coverage of high-latitude regions for climate observation or regional communication services.
“Standard space missions employ conventional elliptical ‘Keplerian’ orbits,” comments Colin McInnes, Professor of Engineering Science at the UK’s University of Glasgow.
“However, our VisionSpace project has been investigating novel families of orbits and space systems across a broad range of sizes that could make use of additional factors such as solar radiation pressure, air drag or gravitational interactions.
“The space systems range from microscale applications such as satellite swarms and dust clouds, to mesoscale large deployable space webs and solar sails, all the way up to macroscale solutions such as asteroid capture.”
VisionSpace was a five-year project ending in 2014 to research space system engineering across the extremes of size, funded by the European Research Council.
Prof. McInnes, who oversaw the project while at the University of Strathclyde, was recently invited to ESA’s ESTEC technical centre by the Agency’s Advanced Concepts Team to highlight the project’s findings.
The ACT is tasked with peering beyond the horizon of current space projects. Further information on ESA's activities concerning Earth's polar regions can be found on the ESA Space for Earth website.
