SPACE.com -- European Space Agency Celebrates 25 Years in Space


	European Space Agency Celebrates 25 Years in Space By Maia Weinstock Staff Writer posted: 06:05 am ET 05 June 2000

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On May 31, 1975, 11 European nations came together to form an international organization devoted to enhancing humans' presence in space. Twenty-five years later, the European Space Agency (ESA) -- now 15 nations strong -- is one of the foremost space agencies in the world.

Born out of two earlier groups -- the European Space Research Organization and the European Launcher Development Organization -- ESA has compiled an amazing list of accomplishments in just a quarter of a century. The list includes numerous space, Earth-monitoring and telecommunications satellites, a family of powerful rockets and various contributions to piloted spaceflight programs.

"Our missions have been quite unique and are giving very good results to the whole scientific community," said Franco Bonacina, a spokesman for ESA. "I think that everyone can be proud of what we do in space."

"Within ESA we speak different languages and we have different cultures,but we've made a success of our forces."

However, ESA's biggest achievement of all, explained Bonacina, lies not in any one particular space project. Rather, it's the fact that 15 European nations have successfully worked together, and in cooperation with other non-European space programs, to reach a common goal.

"Within ESA we speak different languages and we have different cultures, but we've made a success of our forces," said Bonacina. "We are now experiencing international cooperation with NASA, with the Russians, with the Japanese, with the Canadians and we believe that this is the way to do it. I do not believe that any one of us will get to Mars alone, so if we want to get there, we've got to work together."

In honor of ESA's first 25 years in space, SPACE.com proudly presents a historical outline of the agency's greatest successes.

Space science

Giotto was ESA's first interplanetary probe, and the first-ever spacecraft to take detailed images of a comet's nucleus. Launched in July, 1985, Giotto reached to within 370 miles (600 kilometers) of Comet Halley in March, 1986. Giotto sent back a total of 2,112 images and recorded tens of thousands of comet-dust impacts, all of which contributed to a complete rethinking of scientists' understanding of comet composition and form.

The Giotto spacecraft captured these images of Comet Halley's dark nucleus as it swooped by in 1986.

Ulysses, launched on Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990, was the first satellite to monitor the poles of the sun. Currently in orbit around the sun perpendicular to the plane that contains the planets, Ulysses has already passed both poles of the sun several times. The probe continues to map our star's heliosphere, a spherical envelope of charged particles that emanate from the solar disk.

Since its launch in 1995, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has taken numerous pictures of the sun and its surroundings in an effort to understand the makeup and workings of our nearest star. The science being returned from this unique mission ranges from understanding the sun's hot interior, to studying the sun's visible surface and stormy atmosphere, to clarifying how solar storms of charged particles affect Earth's tenuous atmosphere.

An artist's rendition of the Ulysses spacecraft, in orbit around the sun.

ESA's X-ray Multi-Mirror Newtonsatellite is the largest telescope ever built in Europe, and the largest to study deep-space X-ray sources. The telescope was created to combat the effects of Earth's atmosphere, which blocks out X-rays emanating from deep-space celestial events, on ground-based telescopes. Launched in 1999, XMM-Newton has already given scientists a great amount of X-ray data from some of the most distant regions of space.

Earth observation

Meteosat is a family of meteorological and weather-forecasting satellites, which are currently in orbit around Earth. ESA employs six Meteosat satellites, which broadcast images of Europe and Northern Africa in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Used by television and radio stations across Europe, Meteosat currently takes pictures of Earth every 30 minutes.

ESA's Meteosat satellite takes pictures that are turned into weather maps for all of Europe.

ESA's European Remote Sensing (ERS) twin satellites 1 (now defunct) and 2 are stocked with special radar instruments to survey Earth day and night, and in all weather conditions. These satellites specialize in monitoring phenomena such as ocean currents and sea surfaces, polar ice caps and ice movement, as well as levels of ozone in the atmosphere. Together, the satellites have given scientists a great deal of information about the state of our planet.

Launchers

ESA has had great success with the development of Ariane, the premiere rocket family for the launching of European space probes and telecommunications satellites. The first Ariane rocket, Ariane 1 was first launched on December 24^th, 1979. Since then, four additional Ariane models have been developed and launched by ESA and its daughter company, Arianespace. Over the years, the Ariane launchers have placed more than 200 satellites into Earth orbit.

The Ariane family of rockets has helped propel ESA into various space operations.

Spaceflight

ESA was the force behind Spacelab, a reusable laboratory designed by ESA to allow astronauts to conduct various science experiments in microgravity. Mounted inside the cargo bay of the space shuttle, Spacelab was used 24 times between 1983 and 1997. A variety of sciences benefited from this space laboratory, including atmospheric, space plasma, astrophysics, astronomy, microgravity and life sciences.

A corps of 16 astronauts currently represents the various European nations involved with ESA's spaceflight programs. Many have already flown with American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, both on space-shuttle and space-station missions. Most of these astronauts are currently in training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for upcoming missions to the International Space Station (ISS), in which ESA has a significant stake.