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.
Launched 27 September 2003, SMART-1 was the first of ESA's 'Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology'. It travelled to the Moon using solar-electric propulsion and carrying a battery of miniaturised instruments; it entered lunar orbit 15 November 2004.
As well as testing new technology, SMART-1 did the first comprehensive inventory of key chemical elements in the lunar surface. It also investigated the theory that the Moon was formed following the violent collision of a smaller planet with Earth, four and a half thousand million years ago.
Having conducted extensive lunar science operations, its mission ended through a controlled lunar impact on 3 September 2006.
SMART-1 was the first European spacecraft to travel to and orbit around the Moon - this was only the second time that ion propulsion has been used as a mission's primary propulsion system (the first was NASA's Deep Space 1 probe launched in October 1998).
SMART-1 mission operations were conducted from ESOC, ESA's European Space Operations Centre, 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
