99 objects telling tales from ESA's technical heart
From simulated moondust to an ultraflat floor, a 3D-printed human bone to a wall decoration that once flew on the Hubble Space Telescope, the new 99 Objects of ESA ESTEC website gives visitors a close-up view of intriguing, often surprising artifacts assembled together to tell the story of ESA's technical heart.
"Objects are what matter," famed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote. "Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings." So what manner of objects come out of more than half a century of activity at Europe's biggest space center?
The European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, is ESA's singe largest establishment, based on the North Sea coast at Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
Often described as the technical heart of ESA, ESTEC is where most ESA projects are born and where they are guided through the various phases of development.
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