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Cosmic Vision 2015-2025: and the candidate missions are...

19 October 2007

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This view of nearly 10 000 galaxies was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and it is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies (about 100) may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 thousand million years ago, when the cosmos was 13 thousand million years old.

The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between 24 September 2003 and 16 January 2004.

Credits: NASA/ ESA/ STScI (S. Beckwith)/ HUDF Team

Solar System

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Jupiter's moon Io casts a shadow as it transits Jupiter

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While hunting for volcanic plumes on Io, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the volatile moon sweeping across the giant face of Jupiter.

Credits: J. Spencer (Lowell Observatory) and NASA

Tandem, a new mission to Saturn, Titan and Enceladus

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This Cassini-Huygens image shows the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus, which is the side opposite the moon's direction of motion in its orbit. Enceladus is 499 kilometres across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on 27 October 2004, at a distance of about 766 000 kilometres from Enceladus. The image scale is 4.6 kilometres per pixel.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cross-scale, deeper study of near-earth space

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This composite image shows a SOHO image of the Sun and an artist's impression of Earth's magnetosphere.

Credits: Magnetosphere: NASA, the Sun: ESA/NASA - SOHO

Marco Polo, an asteroid sample-return mission

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This picture of asteroid 951 Gaspra was obtained by the Galileo spacecraft during its approach to the asteroid on 29 October, 1991.

Credits: NASA

Plato, the new planet finder

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An artist’s impression of a transiting exoplanet, named 'HD 189733b'.

Scientists have reported the first conclusive discovery of the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System.

Infrared analysis of this gas giant’s transit across its parent star provided the breakthrough. The planet HD 189733b lies 63 light-years away, in the constellation Vulpecula.

It was discovered in 2005 as it dimmed the light of its parent star by some three percent when transiting in front of it.

Credits: ESA - C.Carreau

Spica, the next generation infrared observatory

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The entire sky in infrared light as seen by AKARI

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This image shows the entire sky in infrared light at nine micrometres. The bright stripe extending from left to right is the disc of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Several bright regions corresponding to strong infrared radiation appear along or next to the Galactic Plane. These regions are sites of newly born stars. At the brightest region in the very centre of the image, towards the centre of our Galaxy, old stars crowd together. AKARI observed the infrared radiation emitted from the heated interstellar dust.

Credits: JAXA

XEUS, X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy

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XMM-Newton observes fossil galaxy cluster

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XMM-Newton observations of the fossil galaxy cluster RX J1416.5+2315, show a cloud of hot gas emitting X-rays (in blue). The cloud, reaching temperatures of about 50 million degrees, extend over 3.5 million light years and surround a giant elliptical galaxy believed to have grown to its present size by cannibalising its neighbours.

Credits: Khosroshahi,Maughan, Ponman,Jones,ESA,ING.

Cosmic Vision 2015-2025: ESApod

Cosmic Vision

More about ESA's Cosmic Vision...

ESA's 'Cosmic Vision'Defining the Cosmic Vision Missions beyond imagination

50 new mission proposals for ESA's scientific programme “The future starts today” - One step closer to shaping ‘Cosmic Vision 2015-2025’Cosmic Vision 2015-2025:
ready to launch

ESA gives go-ahead to build BepiColombo ESA's Cosmic Vision workshop 2004 Plans for the future IAA's vision for the next steps in exploring deep space How a mission is chosen