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 topicThe inherent scaleability of this architecture permits a choice of the level of redundancy, and the choice of homogeneous or heterogeneous systems optimised for each mission, using processors such as the ERC32 (SPARC) and 21020 DSP architectures, and the ESA-sponsored development of space qualified radiation resistant processors is clearly desirable.
CORBA is proposed as the software environment – it allows many different types of software objects to work together to provide a system. Each object is ignorant of the programming languages, CPU type, protocols or operating systems used for other objects with which they interact.