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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Exploring the ‘invisible Universe’ – the mysterious web of dark matter and the dark energy that maintains the accelerated expansion of the Universe – is an ambitious task that ESA is tackling with Euclid, a mission to help us understand these exotic entities, which account for more than 95% of the Universe’s makeup.
With XMM-Newton and Integral, ESA is observing rapidly spinning dead stars and hot gas in the cosmic web, some of the hottest and most energetic phenomena anywhere. Future missions like Athena and LISA will enable us to study, for the first time, even more extreme high-energy events – such as colliding supermassive black holes producing gravitational waves, fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime.