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 ESA tracking stations network - ESTRACK - is a worldwide system of ground stations providing links between satellites in orbit and our Operations Control Centre at ESOC. The core ESTRACK network comprises 13 terminals sited at nine stations in six countries.
The essential task of all ESA tracking stations is to communicate with our missions, uplinking commands and downlinking scientific data and spacecraft status information. ESTRACK stations also gather radiometric data to help mission controllers know the location, trajectory and velocity of their spacecraft.
ESTRACK stations are controlled and remotely commanded during routine operations from the ESTRACK Control Centre, located at ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany.
Each ESTRACK station hosts one or more terminals, each of which comprises an antenna and its associated signal processing equipment. Stations can support multiple missions and ESTRACK also shares resources with other agencies and satellite operators.
ESOC
ESOC video
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
