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.
ESA is an international organisation with 18 Member States. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programmes and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country.
ESA's Education Office is responsible for the Agency’s corporate education programme bringing together young people from many different nations. The objectives of ESA’s Education Office are: in general, to motivate young people to study science and technology and in particular, to ensure a qualified future workforce for ESA and the European space sector. This is achieved by organising various activities designed for specific age groups, keeping the educational community informed about these developments, and providing inspirational materials that assist teachers and students with the learning process.
ESA and CanSats
Since 2000, ESA has been very active in organising and supporting hands-on projects that offer students their first practical experience of working on space-related hardware and software. CanSat activities are directly in line with this strategy, thus ESA is working to encourage their spread throughout its Member States. One of the first actions was to set up this online portal, allowing European teams to discover each other's projects and to exchange information and ideas. To further raise the profile of CanSats in Europe, ESA also initiated the first European CanSat Competition in August 2010.
