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.
By 1983, when this calendar was produced, two Meteosat weather satellites were in orbit: Meteosat-1, launched 23 November 1977, and Meteosat-2, launched 19 June 1981. The poster, in German, shows Meteosat data products in visible, infrared and water vapour wavelengths.
Placed in geostationary orbit at 0 degrees longitude, Meteosat-1 provided a permanent field of view over most of Europe, the whole of Africa, the Middle East and the eastern half of South America - in total over 100 countries.
Image data was transmitted to the Data Acquisition, Telemetry, and Tracking Station, Odenwald, Germany, for relay to the Meteosat Ground Computer System and Meteosat Operations Control centre at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC).
The first-generation Meteosats provided data 24 hours a day from the three spectral channels of the main instrument; the Meteosat Visible and Infrared Imager (MVIRI), every 30 minutes.
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
