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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A newly closed activity from the Technology Development Element (TDE) has developed an engineering model that gives a state-of-the-art insight into how dust behaves in the space environment. One of the processes required to turn the integrated particle trajectories into a modelled dust distribution in the inner solar system is saving the dust cloud as an octree object (a way of modelling three-dimensional space by giving each point eight 'children' points surrounding it). This shows an example Octree structure for the dust cloud in the ecliptic plane: example for a 50 µm Jupiter family comet data set.