11/09/2017 (Agence Europe) – On Friday 8 September, the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) celebrated its 50th anniversary. The centre is located in Darmstadt, Germany, and was founded in 1967, 10 years after the launch of the Soviet Sputnik space probe. Over the course of five decades, the ESCOC has headed 77 missions in the telecommunications and meteorological sectors, as well as in terrestrial observation and exploration. These missions include Giotto, which flew over Halley’s Comet in 1998, the Huygens probe, which attached itself to Titan in 2005 and the Rosetta and its Philae landing craft, which landed on Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014. The ESOC is currently heading 10 missions consisting of 17 satellites which include Copernicus and Galileo, the two European flagship programmes (see EUROPE 11551). (PH)