16 July, at about sixteen and half minutes into the flight, the station in the Canary Islands acquired a signal from Apollo 11 for several minutes after the loss of signal to the USNS Vanguard positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its location, Maspalomas was the first ground station to make contact with Apollo spacecraft once they entered orbit. During the Moon landing on 20 July, Maspalomas provided the real-time backup for the MSFN station at the former Fresnedillas Station, Madrid (now the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex) while the Apollo 11 crew made their first steps onto the Moon. In October 1969, in recognition of the role played by Maspalomas Station, the Apollo 11 crew visited Gran Canaria as part of their 38-day world tour and stayed at the newly built Oasis Hotel in Maspalomas. Later missions After the Apollo Missions, Maspalomas supported a number of other important NASA projects, including the monitoring of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), a set of scientific instruments left by astronauts at the various Apollo landing sites, and the Skylab missions. In 1975, after the end of the Skylab 4 and the Apollo–Soyuz missions, NASA decommissioned Maspalomas Station and most of the functions were transferred to Madrid. Equipment from Maspalomas Station was sent over to the NASA station at Tananarive, on Madagascar (part of the Spacecraft Tracking and Data Acquisition Network). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, ESA began to expand operations in Spain, establishing the Villafranca Station in 1978. Maspalomas Station was reopened in 1979 by the Comisión Nacional de Investigación del Espacio and INTA to provide services for ESA and NASDA (now JAXA) and for programmes such as Hispasat, Helios and the International Cospas-Sarsat Programme. Facilities Maspalomas Station holds a 15-metre (50 foot) parabolic antenna which receives S- and X-band and transmits in S-band. The site also has satellite tracking, telemetry, telecommand and radiometry facilities. The station regularly provides support for missions for the European Space Agency (ESA) via the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, including the Cluster satellite mission, MetOp-2 and the SMART-1 Moon mission. Maspalomas has also supported other international space projects, among them missions for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and for the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) (including the ETS-VII rendezvous mission); South Korea's Kompsat-2; and the International Satellite System For Search and Rescue, COSPAS-SARSAT.