The European Space Agency has opened its first research centre in the UK in a move designed to bring more British scientists and engineers into contact with the space industry. The agency has earmarked £1.3m for the facility's first year of operation.
Work at the centre, which is based in a former computing lab built in the 1960s at Harwell science park in Oxfordshire, will focus on climate change science and robotic missions. Other plans include a "planetary protection facility" that will develop procedures to ensure missions to other planets do not contaminate them with terrestrial chemicals or bugs.
The centre will also operate as a storage facility for moon rock, meteorites and other material brought back from space that needs to be kept under clean-room conditions to protect it from the environment.
At an official opening ceremony in London, Esa's director general Jean-Jacques Dordain said: "The European Space Agency is landing in the UK, one hundred years after Louis Blériot," in a reference to the French aviator who became the first person to cross the English Channel in an aeroplane in 1909.
Britain's science minister, Lord Drayson, said the centre was part of Britain's "space renaissance". Earlier this year Esa announced that it had chosen Major Tim Peake as the country's first official astronaut.
"In a few years' time, we'll look back on this period and see it as a generational change in space technology," Lord Drayson said.
The Harwell facility will be run by Martin Ditter, an Esa engineer. Climate scientists from the space agency will arrive at the facility in September.
The centre's climate change unit will work on data from environmental monitoring satellites, helping to refine models of climate change impact. Other projects will look at how to put space technology to good use on Earth, for example to improve transport information and mobile communications.
Further work is planned on robotics and the use of radioactive materials as power sources for space probes.
Earlier this week, Lord Drayson opened a 12-week public consultation on whether Britain should have its own dedicated space agency which would have the power to initiate its own missions.