Flashcards: European space programmes

Giotto was a European robotic spacecraft mission from the European Space Agency.

ELA-2, short for Ensemble de Lancement Ariane 2 (French for Ariane Launch Area 2), was a launch pad at the Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guiana.

Darwin was a suggested ESA Cornerstone mission which would have involved a constellation of four to nine spacecraft designed to directly detect Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars and search for evidence of life on these planets.

Space Station Freedom was a NASA project to construct a permanently manned Earth-orbiting space station in the 1980s.

SMART-1 was a Swedish-designed European Space Agency satellite that orbited around the Moon.

CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite) is a planned European space telescope for the study of the formation of extrasolar planets.

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.

Ariane 1 was the first rocket in the Ariane launcher family.

Ariane 2 was a European expendable carrier rocket, which was used for six launches between 1986 and 1989.

Ariane 3 was a European expendable carrier rocket, which was used for eleven launches between 1984 and 1989.

Ariane 4 was an expendable launch system, designed by the Centre national d'études spatiales and manufactured and marketed by its subsidiary Arianespace.

Azerspace-1/Africasat-1a, also known as AzerSat-1 (Azerbaijani: AzərSat-1) is Azerbaijan's first satellite in space.

The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) was the first of ESA's Living Planet Programme satellites intended to map in unprecedented detail the Earth's gravity field.

The European X-ray Observatory Satellite (EXOSAT), originally named HELOS, was an X-ray telescope operational from May 1983 until April 1986 and in that time made 1780 observations in the X-ray band of most classes of astronomical object including active galactic nuclei, stellar coronae, cataclysmic variables, white dwarfs, X-ray binaries, clusters of galaxies, and supernova remnants.

Envisat ("Environmental Satellite") is a large inactive Earth-observing satellite which is still in orbit.

Philae (/ˈfaɪliː/ or /ˈfiːleɪ/) is a robotic European Space Agency lander that accompanied the Rosetta spacecraft until it separated to land on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, ten years and eight months after departing Earth.

Ulysses is a decommissioned robotic space probe whose primary mission was to orbit the Sun and study it at all latitudes.

Ariane 5 is a European heavy lift launch vehicle that is part of the Ariane rocket family, an expendable launch system used to deliver payloads into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) or low Earth orbit (LEO).

Artemis is a geostationary earth orbit satellite (GEOS) for telecommunications, built for ESA.

Soyuz at the Guiana Space Centre (also known as Soyuz at CSG or Arianespace Soyuz) is an ongoing ESA programme for operating Soyuz-ST launch vehicles from Guiana Space Centre (CSG), providing medium-size launch capability for Arianespace to accompany the light Vega and heavy-lift Ariane 5.

Beagle 2 was a British landing spacecraft that formed part of the European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission.

The Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) is an European Space Agency (ESA) experimental suborbital re-entry vehicle (spaceplane prototype) to validate ESA reusable launchers, evaluated in the frame of the Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP), and developed under the leadership of the NGL Prime SpA company.

The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) is a planned European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft designed by Airbus Defence and Space to visit the Jovian system, focused on studying three of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa (excluding the more volcanically active Io).

Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was a joint NASA–ESA proposal for an exploration of Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus, where many complex phenomena were revealed by Cassini.

KA-SAT is a high-throughput telecommunications satellite owned by Eutelsat.

Venus Express (VEX) was the first Venus exploration mission of the European Space Agency (ESA).

ELA-3, short for Ensemble de Lancement Ariane 3 (French for Ariane Launch Area 3), is a launch pad and associated facilities at the Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guyana.

Galileo is the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that is currently being created by the European Union (EU) through the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European GNSS Agency (GSA), headquartered in Prague in the Czech Republic, with two ground operations centres, Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich in Germany and Fucino in Italy.

The Europa rocket was an early expendable launch system of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO), which was the precursor to the European Space Agency and its Ariane family of launchers.

Vega (Vettore Europeo di Generazione Avanzata, Advanced Generation European Carrier Rocket) is an expendable launch system in use by Arianespace jointly developed by the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) was a space observatory detecting light from 20 keV to 30 GeV in Earth orbit from 1991 to 2000.

Planck was a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) from 2009 to 2013, which mapped the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at microwave and infra-red frequencies, with high sensitivity and small angular resolution.

The Ariane 6 is a launch vehicle under development by the European Space Agency (ESA), with a first test flight scheduled for 2020.

The Tsyklon-4, also known as Tsiklon-4 and Cyclone-4, is a Ukrainian carrier rocket which is being developed for commercial satellite launches.

Swarm is an European Space Agency (ESA) mission to study the Earth's magnetic field.

This is a list of all space probes that have left Earth orbit (or were launched with that intention but failed), organized by their planned destination.

The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) serves as the main mission control centre for the European Space Agency (ESA) and is located in Darmstadt, Germany.

The Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE), a joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, has been making detailed measurements of Earth's gravity field anomalies since its launch in March 2002.

Hermes was a proposed spaceplane designed by the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) in 1975, and later by the European Space Agency.

Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is a space observatory under development by the European Space Agency for launch around 2024.

The Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA), previously called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), is a proposed European Space Agency mission designed to detect and accurately measure gravitational waves — tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time — from astronomical sources.

ELA-1, short for Ensemble de Lancement Ariane 1 (French for Ariane Launch Area 1), also known as Ensemble de Lancement Vega, ELV, and CECLES, is a launch pad at the Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guyana.

Arianespace SA is a French multinational company founded in 1980 as the world's first commercial launch service provider.

The International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) was an astronomical observatory satellite primarily designed to take ultraviolet spectra.

PROBA2 is the second satellite in the European Space Agency's series of PROBA low-cost satellites that are being used to validate new spacecraft technologies while also carrying scientific instruments.