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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This graph is based on Hubble Space Telescope archival data that were used to identify a largely unseen population of very small asteroids. The asteroids were not the intended targets, but instead photobombed background stars and galaxies in Hubble images. The comprehensive treasure hunt required perusing 37 000 Hubble images spanning 19 years. This was accomplished by using ‘citizen science’ volunteers and artificial intelligence algorithms. The payoff was finding 1701 trails of previously undetected asteroids.
[Image description: This graph plots the size of asteroids versus their abundance, based on a Hubble Space Telescope archival survey that found 1701 mostly previously undetected asteroids lying between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The vertical axis lists the number of objects from zero to 70. The horizontal axis lists size, from zero km on the left, to 2 km on the right. The graph slopes up such that the most abundant asteroids detected by Hubble in the survey are 0.5 km across in size.]