The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThe production describes the the ESA's Inter-Orbit Communications (IOC) experiment. In 1992 the NASA launched and then retrieved with the Space Shuttle Endevour the European Retrieval Carrier (EURECA).The IOC terminal was mounted on EURECA and established a data relay link with the ESA's spacecraft Olympus which constituted the geostationary end of a data relay link between the IOC and ground controllers and experimenters. This has allowed ESA and European Industry to aquire a lot of expertise on data relay and has open the way to a lot of practical benefits such as the possiblity to optimise remote sensing data aquistion from satelites like ERS-1.