European Space Agency (ESA) Missions

Consisting of two orbiters, BepiColombo will provide the most complete exploration yet of Mercury, the innermost planet. ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) will map the planet, studying its geology, composition, inner structure, and exosphere.

JAXA are developing the BepiColumbo MMO (Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter).

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

(Image: ESA)

Gaia is a global space astrometry mission. Its goal is to make the largest, most precise map of our Galaxy by surveying an unprecedented number of stars - more than a thousand million.

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

(Image: ESA)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and it will be almost three times the size of Hubble. JWST has been designed to work best at infrared wavelengths. This will allow it to study the very distant Universe, looking for the first stars and galaxies that ever emerged.

The JWST is being developed in partnership with NASA.

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

(Image: ESA)

Herschel will be the largest space telescope of its kind when launched. Herschel’s 3.5-metre diameter mirror will collect long-wavelength infrared radiation from some of the coolest and most distant objects in the Universe. Herschel will be the only space observatory to cover the range from far-infrared to submillimetre wavelengths.

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

(Image: ESA)

Corot will be the first mission capable of detecting rocky planets, several times larger than Earth, around nearby stars. It consists of a 30-centimetre space telescope and will be launched in early 2006.

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

(Image: ESA)

The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission will measure high-accuracy gravity gradients and provide global models of the Earth's gravity field and of the geoid.

See ESA Website for details.

(Image: ESA)

Once completed, the 450-tonne International Space Station (ISS) will have more than 1200 cubic metres of pressurized space - enough room for seven crew and a vast array of scientific experiments.

The European Drawer Rack (EDR) provides a flexible experiment carrier for a large variety of scientific disciplines, and provides the accommodation and resources to experiment with modules housed within standardised drawers and lockers.

See ESA Website for details.

(Image: ESA)

CryoSat is a three-year radar altimetry mission to determine variations in the thickness of the Earth’s continental ice sheets and marine ice cover. Its primary objective is to test the prediction of thinning arctic ice due to global warming.

See ESA Website for details.

(Image: ESA)

Rosetta will be the first mission ever to land on a comet. It will study the nucleus of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and its environment in great detail for a period of nearly two years, and land a probe on its surface.

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

Mars Express is Europe’s first spacecraft to the Red Planet. It carries seven instruments and a lander. The orbiter instruments are remotely investigating the Martian atmosphere, surface and subsurface.

See ESA Website for Mission Overview or Mission Details.

(Image: ESA)