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.
Herschel, ESA's cutting-edge space observatory, carries the largest, most powerful infrared telescope ever flown in space. A pioneering mission to study the origin and evolution of stars and galaxies, it is helping scientists understand how the Universe came to be what it is today.
The first observatory to cover the entire range from far-infrared to sub-millimetre wavelengths and bridge the two, Herschel is exploring further in the far-infrared than any previous mission, studying otherwise invisible dusty and cold regions of the cosmos, both near and far.
Herschel is seeing phenomena out of reach for other observatories at a level of detail that has not been captured before. The telescope's primary mirror is 3.5m in diameter, more than four times larger than any previous infrared space telescope and almost one-and-a-half-times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The cutting-edge spacecraft carries three advanced science instruments: two cameras and a very high resolution spectrometer; their detectors are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero by a sophisticated cryogenic system.
Launch: 14 May 2009
Orbit: Orbiting the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system (L2), a point in space located 1.5 million km from Earth. L2 is a local gravitationally-stable point that is fixed in the Earth-Sun system and is situated on Earth’s night-side.
Mission operations
Monitored and controlled at ESA/ESOC via the DSA-1 ESTRACK deep space station at New Norcia, Australia
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
