About ESA
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.
Highlights
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Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Spain
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Norway
The Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Czechia
Romania
United Kingdom
Slovenia
Sweden
Switzerland
Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicAstronauts
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Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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Solar Orbiter Archive
The Sun up close
Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to our life-giving star, taking images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and being the first to look at its polar regions. With Solar Orbiter's ten instruments, scientists hope to answer some profound questions: What drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity? What heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius? How does solar wind form, and what accelerates it to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second? And how does it all affect our planet?
- Launch date: February 2020
- First images: July 2020
- Beginning of routine science operations: November 2021
- Mission highlights: The closest ever images of the Sun, the first ever close-up images of the Sun’s polar regions, measuring the composition of the solar wind and linking it to its area of origin on the Sun’s surface
- The closest distance to the Sun: 42 million kilometres
