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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The awesome energy of the Sun can be readily appreciated in this sequence of images combining data from three instruments on the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft. It shows the way a solar flare on 25 March 2022, one day before Solar Orbiter’s closest approach to the Sun, created a huge disturbance in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the solar corona, leading to a huge quantity of the gas being hurled into space in a coronal mass ejection.
The first image was taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument at a wavelength of 17 nanometres. The solar flare is shown by an arrow. The view then zooms out to show what the Metis instrument sees. Metis takes pictures of the corona from 1.7 to 3 solar radii by blotting out the Sun’s bright disc. The final zoom shows the huge coronal mass ejection blasting into space. The data comes from SoloHI, which records images made of sunlight scattered by the electrons in the solar wind.