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.
This excellent poster comprises an artist's impression of ESA's Huygens probe operating on the surface of Titan after touching down on 14 January 2005; the artist's view is overlaid with four actual images taken by the probe's Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) instrument during the approximately 2.5-hour descent. The four were taken a different altitudes: 10 km, 5 km, 1.2 km and 0 km.
The joint ESA/NASA Cassini-Huygens mission was launched 15 October 1997 on a Titan-IVB/Centaur launcher from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn on 1 July 2004. The Huygens probe separated from Cassini on 25 December 2004 and landed on Titan on 14 January 2005. In addition to recording data during descent, it continued to operate for an additional 1 hour and 10 minutes - longer than planned - on the surface, sending back a wealth of scientific data on Titan, one of the Solar System's most enigmatic worlds. Subsequently, Cassini continued in operation, exploring the Saturn system.
Cassini-Huygens is the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built and Titan is the remotest point ever reached by a man-made object.
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
