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
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
ESA’s upcoming EarthCARE satellite mission has just taken a big stretch. Engineers at ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre have gently unfolded this new satellite’s huge five-panel solar wing to test that it will deploy correctly once it is in space.
EarthCARE will soon be launched to answer some critical scientific questions related to the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting incident solar radiation back out to space and trapping infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface. This delicate balance is an important factor in regulating Earth’s temperature.
For EarthCARE to deliver the measurements that are needed to make this important step forward in atmospheric science, it carries a suite of instruments, namely an atmospheric lidar, a Doppler cloud radar, a multispectral imager and a broad-band radiometer, which are powered in turn by this mammoth 11-m-long solar wing.