Posted on 13 July 2018 by Rosa
On Monday, 9 July 2018, engineers based at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Germany made the decision to alter the path of the CryoSat satellite, preventing a potentially fatal collision between it and an ‘unknown object’....
Posted on 2 April 2018 by Daniel
Editor’s note: ESA’s Space Debris team have sent in a final update on the reentry of Tiangong-1. As we posted earlier, around once a year, ESA takes part in a joint tracking campaign run by the Inter...
Posted on 18 October 2016 by Daniel
We’re listening: Earth tracking the Schiaparelli lander 19 October Today’s blog post was contributed by Thomas Ormston, a spacecraft operations engineer working here at ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany. Since its successful separation on Sunday, 16 October, Schiaparelli has...
Posted on 15 June 2016 by Daniel
Today, Mars Express established a communication link with NASA's Curiosity rover on the surface to conduct an important test prior to the arrival of ExoMars
Posted on 19 June 2015 by Daniel
If you’ve read the detailed timeline for Sentinel-2A launch on 23 June, you will have noticed an interesting set of entries for Perth towards the end, namely: MET 50:29 – Earliest AOS Vega – PER AOS VEGA...
Posted on 8 February 2015 by Daniel
The tracking and recovery ship, Nos Aries, is now in the Pacific Ocean getting ready for this week’s crucial IXV mission.
Posted on 3 April 2014 by Daniel
In addition to tracking satellites in Earth orbit (or 5AU away in deep space), ESA’s Estrack station network can also receive signals from launchers. Today, a team of ESA engineers from ESOC supported by an industry contractor...
Posted on 24 September 2013 by Daniel
The Agency’s three Deep Space Antenna (DSA) stations are located in Australia, Spain and Argentina, and are centrally controlled from the ESOC Operations Centre in Germany. They are equipped with large, 35 m-diameter parabolic dish reflectors, weighing in at 610 tonnes, that can be rotated and pointed with extreme accuracy.
Posted on 11 January 2013 by Daniel
Linking spacecraft with people at the frontiers of human knowledge: ESA’s Estrack ground station network communicates each day over hundreds of millions of kilometres with deep-space missions, or with Earth observation missions just a few hundred kilometres up. The network returns precious scientific data to scientists on Earth and transmits commands from satellite controllers, all via remote control from ESOC, ESA’s European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany. In Dec 2012, ESA’s ground station network provided 3741 hours of tracking to 18 missions. New #ESTRACK profile video bit.ly/UaYlo8 — ESA Operations (@esaoperations) January 11, 2013 Our new ESTRACK profile video is below! Loading…