Orbital Connections

The 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.