Recently, the Cluster flight control team at ESOC decided to tell the story of how they fly their spacecraft, and they decided to do it via Twitter. Under Spacecraft Operations Manager Bruno Sousa, the team posted a series of tweets that describe in 140 characters or less the entire process of flying their mission, starting with scientific curiosity and how they plan the 4-ship mission’s complex orbits (to match the needs of the scientists), ending with data delivered to the active science archive while the mission operations cycle – involving the extended ‘team of teams’ at ESOC – repeats.

We could post reams of brain-squeezing info in our blog explaining how ESA’s operations teams practice the art and craft of mission control – or you can simply scroll through these non-technical, very current and very engaging tweets to learn, well, even more. Fundamentally, it’s all about linking people with spacecraft travelling to the frontiers of human knowledge.

Questions? Don’t hesitate to tweet them to the @ESA_Cluster mission team using the hashtag #How_We_Fly!

 

#How_We_Fly from @esa_cluster