We have explored many worlds in the Solar System and our space-based instruments have been able to open large windows into previously unknown realms of our universe. What was thought to be quiet has revealed its violence and its incredible activity. Men and women have ventured out of their planetary cradle and have succeeded in their first exploration of another world. They have settled in space and started to work there, first in competition, and then as a global cooperation, in a spirit of peace and for the benefit of mankind.

On the ground, engineers, scientists, technicians, but also politicians, and sometimes dreamers, have worked together to make dreams come true, changing our lives for ever, and hopefully for the best.

Europe's contribution to this great adventure has been significant since the very beginning - although sometimes hidden and little known to the general public. Most of the great concepts that led to the development of space technologies and applications were born in Europe, from rocket design to geostationary orbit, and European scientists have been involved in many of the successes of these last five decades.

Halfway into the first century of the human conquest of space, 2007 indeed sees the results of years of investment and daring engineering, both 'made-in-Europe' and in cooperation with the United States and Russia.

Since the beginning of the year, ESA has been looking at the achievements of some of these key actors in space and describing the many advances that have been made in space science and technology, from access to space and Earth observation to the exploration of planets and of the wide universe.

Through this site you can meet some of these pioneers, past and present.

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Tones from Deep Space
"Beep... beep... beep...." That's the sound that marked the beginning of the Space Age fifty years ago. It was a simple radio tone transmitted by the first satellite, Sputnik 1, as it orbited Earth in October 1957.Since then communication with spacecraft has advanced tremendously. Yet a modern probe on the way to the edge of the solar system is using Sputnik-like tones to send messages back to Earth.

Why the retro technology? It solves a modern problem: multiplication. Sputnik has so many descendants! There are robots on Mars; spacecraft circling Saturn, Mars and the Sun; probes en route to Mercury, the asteroid belt and even Pluto. All of these missions are trying to talk to Earth, creating a cacophony that threatens to overtax NASA's Deep Space Network. If only these probes could learn to communicate with greater brevity as Sputnik once did.

Enter Beacon Monitor--a device onboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft that communicates with Earth using only eight simple tones. It leverages the fact that New Horizons doesn't have much to do during its 9-year voyage to Pluto other than report its status to Earth. "I'm okay," sums up a typical weekly transmission.

New Horizons is capable of complex communication. It can transmit detailed images and data streams rich in numerical information. "But when we only need a basic status check, a few simple tones are fine," says Henry Hotz an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped develop the technology.

Despite its seeming simplicity, the beacon is sophisticated. New Horizons has many systems and all of them must be checked. Onboard software boils down the entire situation into a succinct "diagnosis." The system then uses a low-power antenna to transmit the diagnosis as one of eight simple radio tones. One means I'm okay while the other seven signify calls for help ranging in urgency from Help me soon to Help me now to Red Alert! I'm in big trouble.

This approach has many advantages. "Simple tones from a distant probe are much easier to detect on Earth than an ordinary data transmission," explains Hotz. "If you miss part of a complex data stream the information is lost, but any part of a simple tone can tell you its frequency, thus revealing the message." The simpler transmission means that the beacon can use less of the probe's limited power (New Horizons operates on less power than a pair of 100-watt household light bulbs), and mission scientists can use smaller dishes to receive the signal. "Both of these advantages cut costs and make a mission more feasible."

Beacon Monitor was first tested onboard Deep Space 1, an experimental spacecraft flown in 1998 by NASA's New Millennium Program. The raison d'etre of Deep Space 1 was to test a suite of cutting-edge technologies (e.g., an ion engine, a smart autopilot, super-solar arrays and a back-to-the-future status monitor) for possible use on future missions. "Beacon Monitor passed with flying colors and was later installed on New Horizons."

So, as the Space Age began, it continues, to Pluto and beyond. Close your eyes. Can you hear the tones?

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First Contact: Sputnik
To say the least, it was incredible. The news relayed by the voice on the other end of the phone line hit the president of the San Gabriel Valley Radio Club like a blow to the head. Too incredible, Henry Richter hoped, to be true. Hope was something Richter knew quite well. It went with the job. Not only as president of a local ham radio club; although you always hoped the guy on the other side of the world talking to you over the shortwave would have something interesting to say. No, Richter's familiarity with hope came as a charter member of the nascent space exploration industry

"Some of the things that occurred during that period I can recall like they happened yesterday," said 80-year-old Richter. "There was a warning that it was going to happen, but they were so secretive about everything. Why would they change now?"

The warning materialized in the form of a phone call from Richter's boss, William Pickering, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Pickering was attending meetings in Washington when he heard from a Russian scientist that the Soviets would launch a satellite in the near future.

On October 4 at 10:28 p.m. Moscow time, a brilliant and deafening detonation of smoke and flame illuminated the Soviet Union's rocket test site near Tyuratam, Kazkhistan, as the 32 nozzles announced the rise of the Russian R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile. 295 seconds and 142 miles later, the last of the R-7's engines shut down for good. Soon after, pneumatic locks were activated, a nosecone fairing separated, and an antenna spike was released. Then, in one final act that signaled the dawn of the space age, a pushrod connected to a bulkhead of the R-7 was activated, shoving a 183-pound beach ball-sized aluminum sphere into the cold, harsh blackness of space. Sputnik had arrived.

"I was in my office in Building 125 at JPL when Dr. Pickering called again," said Richter. "I do not recall exactly what was said but it was a short conversation about Sputnik. I then went to a radio receiver and tried to dial it in."

The Russians were advertising that signals from their satellite could be received on a frequency 20 MHz (megacycles). But all Richter could dial in was static. He immediately suspected the high-tension wires located on a hill above JPL were blocking out the frequency. So the U.S. Navy veteran and Caltech graduate got on the phone, but not to his boss Pickering this time. Instead, he called a friend, and more importantly, a member of the San Gabriel Valley Radio Club.

"Bob Legg had a lot of ingenuity and his own ham setup, and he lived in nearby Temple City," said Richter. "At the time there were no high tension wires near Bob's home, so he had a clear shot at receiving a signal."

The one thing Legg did not have was an antenna that could pick up transmissions on 20 MHz. So the resourceful Legg looked around his house and found something he thought could do the job: a wire-mesh mosquito screen on one of his windows. He ran a wire from the screen to his radio, dialed in 20 MHz and listened.

"When Bob called me back and said he'd heard it I sort of went numb," said Richter. "America had been working toward being first in space. The United States had plans on launching a Navy satellite called Vanguard in the coming months. And the Russians had beaten us to it."

As stunned as Richter felt, he knew he still had a job to do. There were many questions to be answered. What could our Cold War enemies do that we could not? What exactly was it that was placed in an orbit above our heads? And most immediate, what was the significance of the continuous string of pulse transmissions radiating out of Sputnik? Richter knew his country's leaders would need these answers as soon as possible. He also knew that JPL was one of the few places in the nation with personnel who had the knowledge, training and equipment to tell them.

Richter and three others piled JPL's best radio gear into a trailer, hooked it to a JPL truck and headed as far away from those infernal high-tension wires as they could. An hour later they pulled up to the substation of the Temple City Sheriff's Department.

"We went here because they were part of a disaster preparedness group. I knew they had a ham radio station and that they could get clear signals from their location," said Richter, "which was appropriate because this certainly qualified as a disaster in my book. Furthermore, the hams had built a Microlock Station there in anticipation of tracking our American satellite."

Moments after arrival, the JPLers hooked into the station's power supply, powered up their best receiver, adjusted their antenna and waited. They soon became among the first humans to hear the 'beep-beep-beep' that was announcing the birth of the space age.

In the name of national security Richter and company soon took over the basement of the sheriff's building and set up for the long haul.

"It came in loud and clear," said Richter. "But we did more than listen. We took audio on a reel-to-reel recorder and rolls of strip chart plots of these first signals. We were looking for anything, trying to decipher the significance of what Sputnik was sending out."

Over the next days, weeks and even months, the significance of Sputnik's signals was fiercely debated. Some scientists stated the space transmissions were simply a carrier signal, intended to assist in the confirmation and tracking of the satellite. Others charged that the Soviets were receiving scientific information from Sputnik in code.

While the debate raged, Richter and his group concentrated on the job at hand. Ensconced in the sheriff's basement, they did not immediately appreciate the effect the Soviet achievement had on world opinion. As they monitored and documented the satellite's orbits, the word Sputnik itself, which means "companion" in Russian, quickly became part of the American lexicon. Sputnik was on the front page of just about every major newspaper in America. Within days of their discovery, a wave of VIPs began streaming in to the Temple City Sheriff's Department to hear for themselves what America's Cold War enemies had achieved.

"JPL and Caltech staff were dropping by to get an earful and it soon got pretty crowded in that basement," said Richter. "Then the media came, including the three networks. There were so many people crowded into that small room, it got to be too much. So I said the next guy to come down those stairs was getting kicked out. Sure enough, here comes someone and without looking I told him to get the heck out. Turns out, it was the Under-Sheriff Pitchess of Los Angeles County. It was his station and he could have kicked me out, but instead he turned around and left his own basement; more than once he referred to that incident publicly. He was a proud American and knew we were doing important work."

JPL's important work in the basement of the Temple City Sheriff's Department would go on for several months. But well before Sputnik gave its final beep 22 days later, Richter was pulled away to work on another important project. On behalf of JPL and his boss Dr. William Pickering, Richter crisscrossed the country, representing the team that would find the perfect instruments to go into a JPL-made satellite.

The first chance to reach the high ground of space came two months and two days later.

At 11:45 AM on December 6, 1957, a nationwide audience watched as the Navy's Vanguard rocket, the United States first orbital space attempt, exploded on the pad. America's next shot at the high ground came from JPL and the US Army's Explorer program.

"Explorer was a crash program," said Richter. "We were determined to get this thing up one way or another and Sputnik merely pushed the button."

On January 31, 1958, a Juno rocket climbed eastward into the night's sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida. Within minutes, the Juno and its cargo, the JPL-manufactured satellite called Explorer 1, disappeared over the horizon -- its fate unknown.

"I was at the Cape that night waiting for our JPL listening post on the West Coast to confirm that they heard signals coming down from the satellite," said Richter. "We had all these listening posts and the first call I get is from one of my club's ham radio operators saying they were receiving Explorer 1. My guys were first to hear we made it, that we made it for America."

The 50th Anniversary of JPL's Explorer 1 mission is January 31, 2008.

Related Links
2007: a space jubilee
Podcast: Sputnik: The Beep Heard Round the World
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