VEGA at ESAC
The European Space Astronomy Centre hosts the scientific
operations centres for ESA's astronomy and planetary missions,
along with their scientific archives. Based at Villanueva de la
Cañada, near Madrid in Spain, ESAC provides services to
astronomical research projects worldwide.
VEGA has 30 staff working at ESAC. We support major astrophysics
missions such as Herschel, Planck, Gaia and XMM by developing
software, calibrating the instrumentation and interpreting the
scientific data. Our staff also work on a number of planetary
probes including Venus Express, Mars Express, and Rosetta. For
these, we monitor the status and health of the probes, plan the
in-orbit observing schedules and programme comet interactions. We
take a leading role in making all the data available for the
scientific community via online archives, and by a sophisticated
infrastructure known as the Virtual Observatory.
ESAC is the hub of Europe's space research, and VEGA staff have
the luxury of getting sight of new data taken by some of the
world’s most advanced Space telescopes and probes. The site in
Madrid is fairly small and retains an intimate, friendly,
atmosphere which makes for a pleasant and stimulating working
environment.