A colourful selection of posters and calendars illustrating the past three decades of ESA missions and programmes, and highlighting activities at ESOC, the European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.
This gallery was selected from archives kept at ESOC and from a collection maintained by Klaus Lenhart, who retired from the Centre in 2000 after 37 years.
Planck is Europe's first mission to study the Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang, which occurred about 14 thousand million years ago. This radiation was initially energetic, but with the continued expansion of the Universe, what was once a searing fireball has since cooled to become a background sea of microwaves. Planck rotates to scan the sky and measure the temperature variations across this microwave background with much better sensitivity, angular resolution and frequency range than any previous satellite, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of our Universe when it was extremely young, just 300 000 years old.
The spacecraft was lofted into space in a double launch, together with ESA's Herschel space telescope, on board an Ariane 5 ECA launcher on 14 May 2009. Planck is 4.2 m high and has a maximum diameter of 4.2 m; the Planck Mission Operations Control Centre (MOC) is located at ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany.
ESOC
ESOC videos
History of Europe in space
50 years of space in pictures
30 years of ESA in pictures
ESA 'birthday card' of Apollo 11 landing site
NASA Apollo 40th anniversary site
