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
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Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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For the first time ever recorded, in the late summer of 2021, rain fell on the high central region of the Greenland ice sheet. This extraordinary event was preceded by a heatwave and followed by a rapid melt of the surface snow and ice. This image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 23 August 2021 depicts the severity of the melt. Researchers, supported by ESA’s Science for Society programme, discovered that it wasn’t actually the rain that caused the melt, it was unusually warm ‘atmospheric rivers’ that swept along Greenland, bringing potent melt conditions when the melt season would normally be drawing to a close.
Read full story: Historic Greenland ice sheet rainfall unravelled