Horizon 2000

Horizon 2000

ESA's long-term space science research program covering the period from 1995 to the early 2000s. ESA originally introduced the program as early as 1984 and intended it to cover the years 1995-2007. There were four major ‘cornerstone’ missions. The first was ESA's contribution to the international Solar/Terrestrial Energy Programme (STEP). The second was the X-ray spectroscopy mission XMM. The other two were the Far Infrared and Submillimeter Space Telescope (FIRST) and the Rosetta cometary mission. There were also some less costly small and medium-sized projects. In 1992, ESA set up a survey committee to identify the main aims and challenges of future space missions and to design a new long-term program for the period up to 2016. This new program, Horizon 2000+, was approved in 1995. With the new project came a further four ‘cornerstone’ missions, including a Mercury orbiter (now under development as BepiColombo), an interferometry and astrometry mission (see GAIA), a project to observe gravity waves (now being developed as LISA), and a mission to join the search for extrasolar Earth-like planets (currently being considered under the name Darwin). The new name for the program, Horizon 2000+, was shortlived, however, and ESA decided to refer to both the original plan and its extension as Horizon 2000.

The Horizon 2000 program provided a basis for a number of projects not originally included, such as Giotto, Ulysses, and Hipparcos. It was also seen as the inspiration for the Huygens probe that formed ESA's contribution to the NASA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, landing on Titan in January 2004. The first two ‘cornerstone’ missions of Horizon 2000 have achieved implementation: SOHO and Cluster (ESA's contributions to STEP) and the XMM satellite (launched as XMM-Newton in 1999); the fourth, Rosetta, was launched in 2004. a year behind its original schedule and with a new target, Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The remaining ‘cornerstone’ mission, FIRST, has been renamed Herschel and is due for launch in 2007, alongside another ESA science mission, Planck. Horizon 2000 has been unanimously welcomed by the scientific community both within and outside Europe. Many non-European scientists collaborate on its missions. In 2004, ESA invited proposals for space projects to be considered covering the years 2016 to 2025.

Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006
References in periodicals archive ?
Neither does the country today harbor grand messianic expectations of another national political savior, as a conflict-fatigued people did in Lebanon some 27 years ago, when the national perspective shifted from the immense exhaustion of internal conflicts to the enthusiasm of Rafik Hariri's reconstruction drive and Horizon 2000 plans.
C'est ainsi que le programme national prevoit a cet horizon 2000 MW solaires, 2000 MW hydrauliques et 2000 MW eoliens.
Moreover, although the World Bank accepted the country's reconstruction program - called "Horizon 2000" - the money for it, from the European Investment Bank and Arab funds, has barely trickled in.
The new monies will fund missions under the agency's 1994 20-year Horizon 2000 Plus programme and technology development for its next double-decade agenda, called Cosmic Vision, that starts in 2015.
Il aborde aussi les grandes interventions urbanistiques montrealaises qui ont anime le maire Jean Drapeau (construction du metro et du reseau autoroutier, Expo 67, plan d'urbanisme Horizon 2000, Jeux Olympiques).
Horizon 2000: The 1998-2000 Operational Plan for the Florida Judicial Branch is the first operational plan adopted by the court and has been the major planning document of the Harding administration.
The reconstruction project, called Horizon 2000, has cost three quarters of a billion dollars annually since 1993, and is projected to cost a billion dollars a year through 2001, large expenditures in a country of three million citizens.
La presence de vastes terrains vacants autour du centre-ville s'explique par l'etonnante speculation demographique, annoncee par Montreal Horizon 2000, qui entrevoyait que la population atteindrait huit millions d'habitants au debut du millenaire.