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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ESA's Solar Orbiter mission is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to our life-giving star, taking images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and being the first to look at its polar regions.
With Solar Orbiter's ten instruments, scientists hope to answer some profound questions: What drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity? What heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius? How does solar wind form, and what accelerates it to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second? And how does it all affect our planet?
Solar Orbiter's journey around the Sun
Note: This graphic was updated in April 2025 to show an image of the Sun taken by Solar Orbiter's EUI instrument.