King greets students

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands greets young students during the celebration of 50 years of European space cooperation at ESA's ESTEC technical centre on 16 December 2014. Beside the King stands Lilianne Ploumen, Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, and behind him ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain and the Head of the Dutch Delegation to the ESA Council Jasper Wesseling. Dutch primary, second and university students presented research projects they had carried out with ESA’s Education Office. A variety of topics were covered in the studies, from the water content of comets to the process of convection in gravity versus weightlessness, and how glacial ice flow is affected by changing gravity levels – the latter study enabled by access to ESTEC’s hypergravity-generating Large Diameter Centrifuge.