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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Gaia Archive
ESA's billion star surveyor
The mission
From 27 July 2014 to 15 January 2025, Gaia has made more than three trillion observations of two billion stars and other objects throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond, mapping their motions, luminosity, temperature and composition. Gaia's extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map will provide the data needed to tackle an enormous range of important questions related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our galaxy.
- Launch: 19 December 2013
- Orbit: L2 Lagrange point
- End of science observations: 15 January 2025
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Upcoming data releases:
Data Release 4 (based on 66 months of data): not before mid 2026
Data Release 5 (based on all mission data) not before the end of 2030 -
Previous data release milestones:
Data Release 1: 14 September 2016
Data Release 2: 25 April 2018
Early Data Release 3: 3 December 2020
Data Release 3: 13 June 2022
Focused Product Release: 10 October 2023
- 1 billion pixel camera
- 10 m sunshield
- 1800 million objects
