The European Space Agency, counterpart of NASA in the U.S., is willing to provide substantial funding for cost-effective missions to outer planets and outside the solar system as well as studies about the Earth's northern or southern lights and particle acceleration in the sun.

This developed as ESA member states embraced a mission proposal that provides for the launching of the Solar Orbiter, a probe that will conduct close observations of the polar region of the Sun.

If it materializes, it will be one of the most ambitious space missions ever to study the sun's behavior, according to BBC News.

The project is expected to cost almost 1 billion euros.

The Euclid science mission, a parallel effort, aims to understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter by measuring the accelerated expansion of the universe through various independent processes, according to the concept of ESA's science program.

Euclid's targets include galaxies and clusters of galaxies in a wide extragalactic survey covering 15,000 degrees.

NASA will also be involved in the collaborative undertaking, providing two instruments for the probe and the rocket that will send the mission on its way.

Europe prefers to carry out the mission on its own but the U.S. is bent on staging an equivalent exercise described as Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope or W First. But budget pressures mean this spacecraft is unlikely to be built until after Euclid has flown, giving Europe a clear lead in one of the most important fields of modern astrophysics, BBC News said in its report.

"Euclid provides us with an insight into how structures in the universe are growing and whether they are growing at the rate we expect from general relativity (our theory of gravity on large scales)," explained Bob Nichol, a Euclid scientist from Portsmouth University.

The discovery in the late 1990s of dark energy and its influence on cosmic expansion was recognized with a Nobel Prize which paid tribute to three scientists.

Just like Solar Orbiter, the cost of the Euclid venture will be close to a billion euros.

The mission still needs to pass through certain legal procedures and formal adoption is not expected until 2012 while the launch could probably take place in 2019.