ESA Portal - Meet ESA, the space agency for Europe

 ESA now has 20 Member States
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ESA's Villafranca VIL-2 15m S-band antenna with flags of ESA member states. Its 15m diameter dish antenna performs reception and transmission in S-band including an auto track capability, a ranging system, a frecuency and timing system, a monitoring and control system, and a communications system. 

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

You, together with your 500 million fellow citizens from ESA’s 20 European member nations, are the collective owners of one of the world’s leading space agencies.

The European Space Agency is an intergovernmental organisation, a cooperative coming together of its Member States in their national interest and common good. With Europe’s space ministers meeting on 20-21 November to decide the Agency’s future course, this new video offers a quick introduction: Europe, meet ESA. 
ESA does a lot with little, its budget several times lower than its international counterparts.
For an investment equivalent to a cinema ticket for each of us per year, the European Space Agency is one of the few organisations in the world active in all areas of space: exploring space and safeguarding the terrestrial environment while also boosting our continent’s technical knowhow and economic competitiveness.
“We can do more, together” was the credo that led 10 European states to found ESA back in 1975. Today, the success of this approach is clear. ESA technical leadership and the permanent support of its Member States have built a competitive European space industry in the global front rank.

Ariane-5 ECA launch
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Ariane-5 ECA launch of Herschel and Planck in May 2009 from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace-Service Optique CSG

From weather satellites to space-based telecommunications, navigation and environmental monitoring, the systems ESA has put in place have helped to strengthen Europe’s strategic independence and its place in the world, along with our quality of life and prosperity. ESA activities have given rise to new jobs, businesses and entire high-value industries.

“We can do more together” turned out to be an accurate prediction. Almost four decades on, this space agency for Europe has 20 member states, collectively achieving results that no single nation could match.

ESA has forged a culture of diversity, collaboration and excellence. Good work tends to have an impact, and ESA’s long-term record of cooperative success has in turn inspired a new ethos of cooperation among global space powers.

To learn more about ESA and its many and varied impacts on Europe and the world, watch the short video above.

This image shows molecular clouds in the Pegasus region as seen through the glow of carbon monoxide (CO) with Planck (blue). Molecular clouds, the dense and compact regions throughout the Milky Way where gas and dust clump together, represent one of the sources of foreground emission seen by Planck. The vast majority of gas in these clouds consists of molecular hydrogen (H2), and it is in these cold regions that stars are born. Since cold H2 does not easily radiate, astronomers trace these cosmic cribs across the sky by targeting other molecules, which are present there in very low abundance but radiate quite efficiently. The most important of these tracers is carbon monoxide (CO), which emits a number of rotational emission lines in the frequency range probed by Planck's High Frequency Instrument (HFI). Emission lines affect a very limited range of frequencies compared to the broad range to which each of Planck’s detectors is sensitive, and are usually observed using spectrometers. But some CO lines are so bright that they actually dominate the total amount of light collected by certain detectors on Planck when they are pointed towards a molecular cloud like those in the Pegasus region. The all-sky CO map compiled with Planck data shows concentrations of molecular gas in portions of the sky that had never before been surveyed. For example, many regions at high galactic latitude, such as the Pegasus region, had not been covered by previous CO surveys. Planck's high sensitivity to CO also means that even very low-density clouds can be detected, as in the case of the Pegasus clouds. Follow-up observations and further studies of this and other stellar nurseries will allow a detailed investigation of the physical and chemical conditions that lead to the formation of molecular clouds, shedding new light on the very early phases of star formation. Credits: ESA/Planck Collaboration
ESA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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