The easy way to track ESA spacecraft

Have you ever wondered where the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are right now? What about the present positions of ESA spacecraft such as Envisat or the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope? Now you can view in real-time the location of the ISS and other ESA-related spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth.

All you have to do is go to the satellite tracking pages on our website. The ‘Follow the Ground Track of ESA Missions’ feature can be found by clicking on the icon on the right of this page, or by using this web link: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Track_ESA_missions/index.html .

Once the site loads, the tracker automatically starts displaying the location of the International Space Station on top of a map of the world. In order to change the map and zoom in or out, simply click on the map buttons. The ground track of the ISS – a line joining the places over which the space station is flying – is drawn in red.

The site also makes it possible to track other spacecraft operated by ESA and its partners. These include:

Four space observatory missions - Integral, XMM-Newton, Cluster (four spacecraft named Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Tango) and the Hubble Space Telescope;
GIOVE-A and GIOVE-B, Europe’s first Galileo navigation satellites;
Seven Earth observation missions - ERS-2, Envisat, GOCE, SMOS, CryoSat-2, Proba-1, and Proba-2.

The satellite location data are projected onto map images provided by Google maps. The actual satellite locations are updated every hour to make the tracking as accurate as possible.

Last modified 09 April 2013