The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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A new vision-based navigation software system for autonomous planetary landings, tested at ESA using a scale-model Moonscape has been recognised for excellence by France’s ONERA aerospace centre. The landing software was evaluated in real life using a compact scale model of the lunar surface linked to a mobile camera, set up in ESA’s Control Hardware Laboratory, located in the ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. For added precision the testbed includes a virtual element – the optical correlation of real images of the lunar model with virtually-rendered image of the same scene generated with PANGU software, a specialised ESA planetary scene generation software developed by University of Dundee