Jean-Jacques Dordain has been appointed to a third term as director-general of the European Space Agency, ESA said on Thursday in a press release.

Dordain, a 64-year-old Frenchman who has been in office since 2003, was named for a further four years, extending his mandate to June 2015, the Paris-headquartered agency said.

ESA has 18 member states, 16 of them members of the European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland, which are non-EU countries. Canada takes part in some projects under a cooperation agreement.

The agency has a budget of 3.744 billion euros (4.6 billion dollars), which is spent on projects for a civilian or scientific use.

In recent years, it has sent robot probes to Venus, Mars and a distant comet, deployed orbital telescopes to observe deep space and begun the Galileo programme, a rival to the US satellite navigation system.