Sentences with phrase «by spacecraft missions»

Over the past decade, major breakthroughs in planetary geophysics have been made by spacecraft missions, space - based telescopes, and ground - based observatories including Keck.

Not exact matches

NASA is preparing astronauts for the next manned mission to the International Space Station onboard the private CST - 100 Starliner spacecraft by Boeing.

But despite dozens of proposed missions spanning almost 30 years, no NASA spacecraft has visited Earth's twin since the Magellan craft ended its mission by plunging into Venus» atmosphere in 1994 and burning up.

On April 30, if all goes well, after running out of fuel to fight off orbital decay NASA's long - running MESSENGER spacecraft will end its mission to Mercury by crashing into the planet's surface at nearly 4 kilometers per second.

This case is bolstered by data from the last mission to make such measurements — the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which swooped by Titan in 1980 during solar maximum conditions and found similarly depleted levels of methane.

NASA is currently developing concepts for the redirect mission that will employ a robotic spacecraft, driven by an advanced solar electric propulsion system, to capture a small near - Earth asteroid or remove a boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid.

Instead of rocketing astronauts off into deep space, the Asteroid Redirect Mission would send a robotic spacecraft to a small asteroid, secure it (potentially by grabbing it and stuffing it into a giant high - tech bag) and tow it back to orbit the moon using a hyper - efficient kind of rocket engine technology called solar electric propulsion.

Farmer's experience with Exxon, which involved a variety of imaging and remote sensing techniques to locate geological structures favorable for the accumulation of petroleum, also served him well in working with NASA mission planners and technologists developing the instruments to be carried into Mars orbit by the next generation spacecraft.

As the spacecraft plunged through these orbits, a radio telescope in Argentina, run by the European Space Agency, NASA's partner on the mission, listened for tiny Doppler shifts in Cassini's signal.

Before the Cassini spacecraft ends its 20 - year mission by disintegrating in Saturn's atmosphere, we have one last chance for new information on the gas giant

The other finalist, the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR) mission, would launch a spacecraft before the end of 2025 to collect a 100 - gram sample from the surface of comet 67P, which was mapped by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, and return it to Earth in 2038.

Two NEAs have been visited by spacecraft: 433 Eros, by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous probe, and 25143 Itokawa, by the JAXA Hayabusa mission.

The only previous data on Jupiter's interior came from the Galileo spacecraft, which ended its mission by entering Jupiter's atmosphere at a single point in 1995.

Two NASA and one European spacecraft, including NASA's MAVEN mission led by the University of Colorado Boulder, have gathered new information about the basic properties of a wayward comet that buzzed by Mars Oct. 19, directly detecting its effects on the Martian atmosphere.

This mission was the fourth cargo flight to the station by a Dragon spacecraft, counting the first test flight in May 2012.

Once the families were identified using the chemical DNA, their evolution was studied with the help of their ages and kinematical properties obtained from the space mission Hipparcos, the precursor of Gaia, the spacecraft orbiting Earth that was launched by the European Space Agency and is almost halfway through a 5 - year project to map the sky.

In honor of the spacecraft MESSENGER, which ends its mission today with a planned collision with Mercury, here's a look back at the craft and its travels, as illustrated by Don Foley for the March 2011 issue of Scientific American.

To reconstruct the spacecraft's orbit with sufficient accuracy, the researchers needed the detailed map of the moon's gravity field provided by the GRAIL mission.

The Deep Space Network, managed by JPL, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe.

Developed in conjunction with Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, FINDER is based on remote - sensing radar technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to monitor the location of spacecraft JPL manages for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

«They are the most massive bodies between the sun and Neptune that have not been visited by a spacecraft,» says Marc Rayman, the chief engineer for a NASA mission dedicated to addressing that lapse.

Schmidt is part of a team of scientists in the early stages of developing a NASA mission, called Europa Clipper, which will investigate these questions by placing a reconnaissance spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter.

The research is part of the Measurements of 11 Asteroids and Comets Using Herschel (MACH - 11) program, which used Herschel to look at small bodies that have been or will be visited by spacecraft, including the targets of NASA's previous Deep Impact mission and upcoming Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS - Rex).

A series of 37 planned close approaches during the mission will eclipse the previous record for Jupiter set in 1974 by NASA's Pioneer 11 spacecraft of 27,000 miles (43,000 kilometers).

Schwadron and colleagues solved the discrepancies using triangulation of four different datasets gathered by other spacecraft, including the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission that in 2009 discovered a mysterious «ribbon» of energy and particles believed to be associated with the interstellar magnetic field.

To help cover expenses, the company plans to merchandise each mission, for instance, by selling the naming rights for their spacecraft.

Recent modeling along with previously published results from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft — short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, a mission that observed Mercury from 2011 to 2015 — has shed new light on how certain types of comets influence the lopsided bombardment of Mercury's surface by tiny dust particles called micrometeoroids.

While NASA's Johnson Space Center manages monitored debris threats for spacecraft related to U.S. manned missions such as the International Space Station, the responsibility for unmanned missions managed by NASA falls to the Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis, or CARA, team operating out of NASA Goddard.

In response to the 1993 failure of the Mars Observer mission — a billion - dollar, decade - in - the - making probe that mysteriously lost contact with ground controllers just before it was scheduled to go into orbit around the planet — NASA administrator Daniel Goldin decided to shift to smaller, less expensive spacecraft and create a sustained exploration campaign by sending one or two probes to Mars at every launch opportunity.

People around the world shared more than 1,400 images of themselves as part of the Wave at Saturn event organized by NASA's Cassini mission on July 19 — the day the Cassini spacecraft turned back toward Earth to take our picture.

Until then the six planets around Kepler 11, which have been validated by various means, are the «Kepler spacecraft's latest — and we think its greatest — finding to date,» said mission co-investigator Jack Lissauer of Ames during a January 31 teleconference with reporters.

NASA's Galileo spacecraft, launched in 1989, was the only space mission to make repeated visits to Europa, passing close by the moon about a dozen times.

ESA's Rosetta spacecraft will end its two - year mission orbiting comet 67P / Churyumov - Gerasimenko by crashing into a once - active pit named Deir el - Medina

That's the conclusion of a four - year mission conducted by the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft, which has created the highest - resolution map yet of the entire cosmic microwave background (CMB)-- the first light to travel across a newly transparent universe about 380,000 years after the big bang.

Although it completed its primary science objectives by March 2012, the spacecraft's mission was extended two times, allowing it to capture images and information about the planet in unprecedented detail.

Mission control confirmed end of operations just a few minutes later, at 3:40 p.m., when no signal was detected by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) station in Goldstone, California, at the time the spacecraft would have emerged from behind the planet.

Coming hot off the heels of discoveries made by other observatories, including NASA's Kepler and CoRot (the Convection, Rotation, and Planetary Transits mission, led by France's CNES with contributions from the ESA), this spacecraft is intended to build significantly on our knowledge of the universe, the Solar System, and the formation of life in general.

Inspiration Mars» mission architecture, as outlined by Tito, calls for two launches: one unmanned SLS launch for placing the Inspiration Mars spacecraft into low - Earth orbit, and a second crewed launch of one of the Commercial Crew transportation vehicles that are currently under development to deliver the crew to the Mars - bound spaceship.

To address concerns about the spacecraft's radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are commonly used for NASA missions, NASA responded by issuing a supplementary document about the flyby and detailing the agency's methodology for protecting the planet, saying there was less than a one - in - a-million chance of an impact occurring.

«Previous observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Swift Gamma - Ray Burst Mission and Deep Impact spacecraft gave us only upper limits for any gas emission from ISON.

Exoplanet HIP 116454b has been discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, marking the first alien world discovered by the once - defunct observatory during the second phase of its mission.

This meant only one thing: The groundbreaking Saturn mission had come to an end — the spacecraft had encountered the uppermost atmosphere of Saturn and, 45 seconds later, it burned up like an artificial meteor caused by the intense heat of hitting the atmosphere at 75,000 miles (120,700 kilometers) per hour.

One possibility, raised in a 2009 paper by New York University - trained physicist Jia Liu, might be using dark matter as an energy source to power spacecraft on extremely long missions.

The unmanned 478 kg (1,054 lb) spacecraft was sent on a 9.5 - year mission to fly by Pluto — a distance so far that radio signals from the nuclear - powered probe take four hours to reach Earth.

Bolden was grilled by subcommittee chairman Steve Palazzo (R - MS) and committee chairman Smith on why he was ignoring NAC's advice to (1) obtain an independent cost evaluation (ICE) of ARM prior to the Mission Concept Review (which just took place), and (2) modify it so that its primary objective is demonstration of high power solar electric propulsion rather than obtaining a sample of an asteroid, and to send the spacecraft to Mars and back rather than to an asteroid.

If the approaching spacecraft has to avoid plowing into smaller fragments, it would be a rather more graceful version of the famous asteroid - dodging sequence in Star Wars — fitting for a mission led by a jet jockey.

The spacecraft flew by Enceladus 22 times throughout its mission and passed through plumes of liquid water spewing from the moon's surface.

NASA has no plans at present to service the JWST as the Hubble telescope was serviced by space shuttle missions, as the Soyuz spacecraft does not have the range or cargo capacity to reach JWST.

Pluto's present, hazy atmosphere is almost entirely free of clouds, though scientists from NASA's New Horizons mission have identified some cloud candidates after examining images taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, during the spacecraft's July 2015 flight through the Pluto system.

Cassini took nearly a half - million images during its mission, which included more than 13 years in orbit around Saturn, a tour that repeatedly took the probe by the moons Titan and Enceladus, two places scientists are eager to send another spacecraft in the search for microbial life.