enus Express is Europe's first mission to the planet regarded as the Earth's sister, to investigate the secrets of the Venusian atmosphere, which may help us to better understand the environmental processes of our home planet. Part of the ESA "Flexibility" Program, development costs have been kept down by maximum reuse of components from predecessor missions (this being a stated aim) -in this case, the direct predecessor being Mars Express. This includes both the spacecraft, and the ground systems. As part of the Mission Operations Centre, the Venus Express Mission Planning System has been successfully developed under tight budgetary and schedule constraints.Consistent with the stated objective, the existing Mars Express Mission Planning System (MPS) was used as the starting point for the Venus Express MPS, allowing a stable system to be rapidly provided under tight budgetary and schedule constraints. In turn, the core of the Mars Express MPS originated from a slimmed-down version of the Envisat Flight Operations Segment MPS -with generic elements being identified as potential candidates for reuse.In this paper, we chart the development of the software during the Venus Express MPS implementation, and how the underlying planning kernel has been enhanced further by this process. This kernel, now referred to as EKLOPS (Enhanced Kernel Library for Operational Planning Systems), also forms the basis of several other planning developments being undertaken on behalf of the European Space Agency.

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Rosetta and Mars Express are two deep space missions that will be launched by ESA in the first half of 2003. The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt provides the Operations Control Centre (OCC) for both missions. In order to minimise the costs and exploit the similarity between the platforms of the two spacecrafts, the decision was taken to develop software for a single Mission Control System (MCS) able to serve both missions.The Rosetta/Mars Express Mission Control System (R(ME)MCS) is based on the ESA's SCOS-2000 MCS infrastructure. SCOS-2000 provides kernel functionality to implement a distributed client/server environment for mission control systems; it is written in C++ using OO methodology and makes use of several COTS products. This paper describes in details the activities performed during the transition from the architectural design to the implementation of the R(ME)MCS, as well as an outline of the innovative concepts developed for Rosetta/Mars Express and considerations on lessons learned.

The ESA Space Camp is a summer camp of the duration of two weeks, offered to the children of ESA (European Space Agency) staff and contractors. Around 200 children from all over Europe meet each year to share an exciting adventure made of sports, nature, arts, culture and… Space! While a professional external company is tasked with the organisation of the logistics of the Camp, a dedicated team of ESA experts takes care of providing each year a rich program of Space and Science activities. This paper focuses on the Space and Science exploration program, and proposes a possible future evolution for offering to many more children in Europe the chance to participate to an ESA Space Camp.

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