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.
The antenna and terminal infrastructure were newly completed in 2002 with successful pointing tests conducted with NASA's Stardust mission, and the station entered service as ESA's first deep-space station in March 2003.
The mechanical movable structure weighs 580 tonnes. Engineers can point it with a speed of 0.4 degrees per second in both axes (horizontal and vertical). Its Servo Control System provides the highest possible pointing accuracy under the site's environmental, wind and temperature conditions.
The New Norcia antenna is one of the largest in the world for telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) applications. It is essential for high-performance communications with spacecraft far out in space and missions in highly elliptical orbits which take them far from Earth.
The station, known as DSA-1, is used to track deep-space missions and provides daily support to Mars Express, Rosetta, Venus Express, Herschel and Planck for routine operations.
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
