Sentences with phrase «close images of the planet»

This gear allows the probe to analyze surface minerals, hunt for underground water, monitor Martian weather and take spectacular up - close images of the planet's surface.

NASA's Cassini probe has sent dazzling up - close images of the planet's icy rings with new details.

Not exact matches

«The first high - resolution images of the planet will be taken on August 27 when Juno makes its next close pass to Jupiter.»

In a sense, that planet feels the closest because we have this image of it.

The Soviet Union and United States both had several failures with their earliest Mars probes, but on July 14, 1965 NASA's Mariner 4 sent home the first close - up images of another planet.

Cassini does not attempt many images of Earth because the sun is so close to our planet that an unobstructed view would damage the spacecraft's sensitive detectors.

Because of Juno's swooping polar orbit that takes it breathtakingly close to the planet, most of JunoCam's images of these features are distorted into an hourglass shape due to foreshortened horizons; the colors are pale, the outlines of clouds hazy.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured the closest images ever taken of Pan, a small moon that orbits Saturn among the planet's rings.

Meanwhile, astronomers will get close - up views of the outer solar system in July 2015, when the New Horizons spacecraft flies past Pluto and sends back detailed images of the once most - distant planet and its three moons.

In total, the mission gave us 21 complete images of Mars, including this, our first close view of the planet — courtesy of data transmitted by the interplanetary probe and earth - bound scientists wielding pastels (below).

The close - up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet.

What is more, improved technology should also allow larger observatories such as Keck to move from the few giant planets already imaged — all of which orbit their host stars at relatively large distances — to closer - in worlds more like our own.

Images of this quality will provide the global context for Juno's close - up views of the planet at the same wavelength.»

The last time a spacecraft studied the planet up close was from 1974 to 1975, when the Mariner 10 probe flew past and took images of some 45 percent of the diminutive world.

The challenge of these facilities is to image planets even closer to their stars than those at the ice line, which includes Earth - like rocky planets.

Some of the science Cassini performed during this period included creating maps of the planet's gravity and magnetic fields, estimating how much material is in the rings, and taking high - resolution images of Saturn and its rings from close - up.

The rover transmitted high - res and detailed close - up images of the red planet's terrain.

The images will continue to improve as the spacecraft spirals closer to the surface during its 16 - month study of the dwarf planet.

As part of that mission, it flies close to the cloud tops that obscure the planet's surface, using its instruments to take images, study the auroras and find out more about the world's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

The closest images ever of Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, have revealed the best view yet of the mystery lights on its cratered surface that have puzzled astronomers for some time.

This composite NASA Hubble Space Telescope Image captures the positions of comet Siding Spring and Mars in a never - before - seen close passage of a comet by the Red Planet, which happened at 2:28 p.m. EDT Oct. 19, 2014.

Two days before its final plunge into Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft turned its camera toward the ringed world to take a series of images for a colour mosaic, capturing a last evocative close - up until a new mission reaches the planet.

On March 29, 2011, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft began sending its first close - up images of planet Mercury from orbit (MESSENGER news release and feature release; and Kenneth Chang, New York Times, March 30, 2011).

This image is one of those mosaic frames and was acquired on January 14, 2008, 18:10 UTC, when the spacecraft was about 18,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) from the surface of Mercury, about 55 minutes before MESSENGER's closest approach to the planet.

(Copyright Ted Stryk) MESSENGER Views Mercury's Horizon As the MESSENGER spacecraft drew closer to Mercury for its historic first flyby, the spacecraft's Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) acquired an image mosaic of the sunlit portion of the planet.

It has gone on to spend more than 14 years gathering a wealth of data from the Red Planet, taking high - resolution images of much of the surface, detecting minerals on the surface that form only in the presence of water, detecting hints of methane in the atmosphere and conducting close flybys of the enigmatic moon, Phobos.

From its very first image of the shuttle Explorer and some of its astronauts floating close to 400 miles high, with a mammoth planet Earth huge behind them, «Gravity» revels in its ability to create images that convey the beauty, enormity and terror that being so, so far out there implies.