The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) serves as the main mission control centre for the

European Space Agency The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 23-member International organization, international organization devoted to space exploration. With its headquarters in Paris and a staff of around 2,547 people globally as of 2023, ESA was founded in 1975 ...

(ESA) and is located in

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it the ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. ESOC's primary function is the operation of uncrewed spacecraft on behalf of ESA and the launch and early orbit phases (LEOP) of ESA and third-party missions. The Centre is also responsible for a range of operations-related activities within ESA and in cooperation with ESA's industry and international partners, including ground systems engineering, software development, flight dynamics and navigation, development of mission control tools and techniques and space debris studies. ESOC's current major activities comprise operating planetary and solar missions, such as

Mars Express ''Mars Express'' is a space exploration mission by the European Space Agency, European Space Agency (ESA) exploring the planet Mars and its moons since 2003, and the first planetary mission attempted by ESA. ''Mars Express'' consisted of two ...

and the

Trace Gas Orbiter The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO or ExoMars Orbiter) is a collaborative project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Roscosmos agency that sent an atmospheric research orbiter and the ''Schiaparelli'' demonstration lande ...

, astronomy & fundamental physics missions, such as

Gaia In Greek mythology, Gaia (; , a poetic form of ('), meaning 'land' or 'earth'),, , . also spelled Gaea (), is the personification of Earth. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenogenic—of all life. She is the mother of Uranus (S ...

and XMM Newton, and Earth observation missions such as CryoSat2 and Swarm. ESOC is responsible for developing, operating and maintaining ESA's ESTRACK network of ground stations. Teams at the Centre are also involved in research and development related to advanced mission control concepts and Space Situational Awareness, and standardisation activities related to frequency management; mission operations; tracking,

telemetry Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring. The word is derived from the Greek roots ''tele'', 'far off', an ...

and telecommanding; and

space debris Space debris (also known as space junk, space pollution, space waste, space trash, space garbage, or cosmic debris) are defunct human-made objects in spaceprincipally in Earth orbitwhich no longer serve a useful function. These include dere ...

Missions

ESOC's current missions comprise the following: Planetary and solar missions * BepiColombo *

* Solar Orbiter *

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO or ExoMars Orbiter) is a collaborative project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Roscosmos agency that sent an atmospheric research orbiter and the ''Schiaparelli'' demonstration lande ...

* Cluster II * JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) *

Hera In ancient Greek religion, Hera (; ; in Ionic Greek, Ionic and Homeric Greek) is the goddess of marriage, women, and family, and the protector of women during childbirth. In Greek mythology, she is queen of the twelve Olympians and Mount Oly ...

Astronomy and fundamental physics missions *

INTEGRAL In mathematics, an integral is the continuous analog of a Summation, sum, which is used to calculate area, areas, volume, volumes, and their generalizations. Integration, the process of computing an integral, is one of the two fundamental oper ...

XMM-Newton ''XMM-Newton'', also known as the High Throughput X-ray Spectroscopy Mission and the X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, is an X-ray space observatory launched by the European Space Agency in December 1999 on an Ariane 5 rocket. It is the second corners ...

Euclid Euclid (; ; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely domina ...

Earth observation missions * CryoSat-2 * Swarm * Sentinel-1A * Sentinel-1C *

Sentinel-2A Sentinel-2A is a European optical imaging satellite launched in 2015. It is the first Sentinel-2 satellite launched as part of the European Space Agency's Copernicus Programme. The satellite carries a wide swath high-resolution multispectral imag ...

Sentinel-2B Sentinel-2B is a European optical imaging satellite that was launched on 7 March 2017. It is the second Sentinel-2 satellite launched as part of the European Space Agency's Copernicus Programme, and with its orbit phased 180° against its siste ...

Sentinel-2C Sentinel-2 is an Earth observation mission from the Copernicus Programme that acquires optical imagery at high spatial resolution (10 m to 60 m) over land and coastal waters. The mission's Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B satellites were joined in or ...

Sentinel-5 Precursor Sentinel-5 Precursor (Sentinel-5P) is an Earth observation satellite developed by European Space Agency, ESA as part of the Copernicus Programme to close the gap in continuity of observations between Envisat and Sentinel-5. It was launched in Octo ...

* SMOS * EarthCARE In addition, the

ground segment A ground segment consists of all the ground-based elements of a spaceflight, space system used by operators and support personnel, as opposed to the Satellite space segment, space segment and user segment. The ground segment enables management of ...

and mission control teams for several missions are in preparation and training, including: *

ExoMars ExoMars (Exobiology on Mars) is an astrobiology programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The goals of ExoMars are to search for signs of past life on Mars, investigate how the Martian water and geochemical environment varies, investigate ...

Biomass Biomass is a term used in several contexts: in the context of ecology it means living organisms, and in the context of bioenergy it means matter from recently living (but now dead) organisms. In the latter context, there are variations in how ...

* FLEX *

PLATO Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

* future satellites of the

Sentinel Sentinel may refer to: Places Mountains * Mount Sentinel, a mountain next to the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana * Sentinel Buttress, a volcanic crag on James Ross Island, Antarctica * Sentinel Dome, a naturally occurring granit ...

programme

ESTRACK

ESOC hosts the control centre for the Agency's European Tracking

ESTRACK The European Space Tracking (ESTRACK) network consists of a number of ground-based space-tracking stations belonging to the European Space Agency (ESA), and operated by the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. The st ...

station network. The core network comprises seven stations in seven countries: Kourou (French Guiana), Cebreros (Spain), Redu (Belgium), Santa Maria (Portugal),

Kiruna (; ; ; ) is the northernmost Stad (Sweden), city in Sweden, situated in the province of Lapland, Sweden, Lapland. It had 17,002 inhabitants in 2016 and is the seat of Kiruna Municipality (population: 23,167 in 2016) in Norrbotten County. The c ...

(Sweden),

Malargüe Malargüe () is a city in the southwest part of the province of Mendoza, Argentina, about 370 km south of the provincial capital Mendoza. It is the head town of the Malargüe Department, and it has about 27,000 inhabitants as per the . Et ...

(Argentina) and

New Norcia New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 ** "New" (Paul McCartney song), 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, 1995 * "New" (Daya song), 2017 * "New" (No Doubt song), 1 ...

(Australia). Operators are on duty at ESOC 24 hours/day, year round, to conduct tracking passes, uploading telecommands and downloading telemetry and data.

Activities

In addition to 'pure' mission operations, a number of other activities take place at the Centre, most of which are directly related to ESA's broader space operations activities. *

Flight dynamics Flight dynamics in aviation and spacecraft, is the study of the performance, stability, and control of vehicles flight, flying through the air or in outer space. It is concerned with how forces acting on the vehicle determine its velocity and at ...

: A team is responsible for all orbital calculations and orbit determinations. * Mission analysis: Selection and calculation of possible orbits and launch windows * Software development: Mission control systems and spacecraft management tools * ESA Navigation Support Office: Calculating and predicting GPS and Galileo satellite orbits * Ground station engineering: Developing deep-space tracking technology *

Space debris Space debris (also known as space junk, space pollution, space waste, space trash, space garbage, or cosmic debris) are defunct human-made objects in spaceprincipally in Earth orbitwhich no longer serve a useful function. These include dere ...

: Coordinating ESA's debris research, provision of conjunction warning services and cooperating with agencies worldwide * Frequency management: Helping manage radio spectrum used by all satellite operators

History

The European Space Operations Centre was formally inaugurated in

, Germany, on 8 September 1967 by the then- Minister of Research of the Federal Republic of Germany, Gerhard Stoltenberg. Its role was to provide satellite control for the

European Space Research Organisation The European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) was an international organisation founded by 10 European nations with the intention of jointly pursuing scientific research in space. It was founded in 1964. As an organisation ESRO was based on a ...

(ESRO), which is today known as its successor organisation, the

(ESA). The 90-person ESOC facility was, as it is today, located on the west side of Darmstadt; it employed the staff and resources previously allocated to the European Space Data Centre ( ESDAC), which had been established in 1963 to conduct orbit calculations. These were augmented by mission control staff transferred from

ESTEC The European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) is the European Space Agency's main technology development and test centre for spacecraft and space technology. It is situated in Noordwijk, South Holland, in the western Netherlands, alth ...

to operate satellites and manage the

tracking station network. Within just eight months, ESOC, as part of ESRO, was already operating its first mission, ESRO-2B, a scientific research satellite and the first of many operated from ESOC for ESRO, and later ESA. By July 2012, ESOC had operated over 56 missions spanning science, Earth observation, orbiting observatories, meteorology and space physics. In 2024 ESA announced a new satellite control center at ESOC. Designed to support multiple launch operations at once and with power redundancy that will provide 99% uptime, the control center will be designed with the future in mind.

Location and expansion

ESOC is located on the west side of the city of

, some from the main train station, at Robert-Bosch-Straße 5. In 2011, ESA announced the first phase of the ESOC II modernisation and expansion project valued at €60 million. The new construction will be located across Robert-Bosch-Straße, opposite the current centre.

Employees

At ESOC, ESA employs approximately 800, comprising some 250 permanent staff and about 550 contractors. Staff from ESOC are routinely dispatched to work at other ESA establishments,

stations, the ATV Control Centre (Toulouse), the Columbus Control Centre (Oberpfaffenhofen) and at partner facilities in several countries.

References

External links

European Space Operations Centre website

ESA Operations website

ESTRACK station website

Space Situational Awareness website

ESA Space Debris website
{{Authority control 1967 establishments in West Germany Buildings and structures completed in 1967 Buildings and structures in Darmstadt European Space Agency facilities International organisations based in Germany Organisations based in Hesse Space technology research institutes