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.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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This image shows the full COSMOS field at one tenth resolution. COSMOS - the Cosmic Evolution Survey – is the Hubble Space Telescope’s largest ever survey of the Universe and was carried out by an international team of 70 astronomers. In making the COSMOS survey, Hubble photographed 575 adjacent and slightly overlapping views of the universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys' (ACS) Wide Field Camera onboard Hubble. It took nearly 1,000 hours of observations. The distances to the galaxies were determined from their spectral redshifts, using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the Subaru and CFHT telescopes in Hawaii and the Magellan telescope in Chile.
At full resolution the image would be 100,800 x 100,800 pixels. The image was taken in hear-infrared light (Hubble’s F814W, or I-band, filter).