Sentences with phrase «craft into orbit»

At the fringes of space, the dual - mode power plant would switch to a conventional rocket engine, drawing on the liquid hydrogen and a small supply of liquid oxygen to propel the winged craft into orbit at a final speed of Mach 25.

Hang on, you might say: gravity is strong enough to keep my feet on the ground, and no space agency firing craft into orbit would ever describe gravity as weak.

In the coming months a privately backed project called LightSail 2 plans to launch a lunch box — size craft into orbit, where it will deploy a Mylar sail about as big as two parking spaces.

Not exact matches

The experiment is to demonstrate the potential to produce parts in orbit cheaply and on - demand instead of having to wait for them to be made on Earth and shipped into orbit on a cargo craft.

Behind the scenes, the former rivals started crafting a deal that put American taxpayer dollars into Russian rocketry and spacecraft, keeping up operations in orbit.

Once it reached its transfer orbit, peaking at 22,000 miles above Earth, the craft unfolded a small pair of solar panels, and its engine began producing a dim blue glow, gently lifting Smart - 1 into higher and higher orbits around Earth.

Despite desperate attempts to reestablish contact by Roscosmos and ESA, the craft remained mute and its orbit degraded until the spacecraft plummeted into the ocean off southern Chile.

The Dream Chaser team touts the craft's advantages: its reusability, its horizontal landings (as opposed to the Soyuz - style parachute landings for a space capsule), and the reliability of the Atlas V rocket booster that will put it into orbit.

In 1993, NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer satellite, presumed to have been disabled by an explosion in a fuel line as the craft tried to slip into orbit around the Red Planet.

Using a backup antenna on the craft, the ground crew established a slow communications link, determined its position, and concluded that a thruster intended to slow the craft to allow Venus's gravity to pull it into orbit shut down prematurely.

How to Build Your Own Spaceship by Piers Bizony When it comes to actually building a craft, your mileage may vary, but Bizony delivers an engaging survey of the commercial space technology that could soon send multitudes of civilians into orbit.

Mars Odyssey, an orbiting craft launched in 2001, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), sent into space four years later in 2005, paved the way for Phoenix by identifying a safe landing spot from orbit.

The European Retrievable Carrier, Eureca, is scheduled to leave the shuttle at an altitude of around 350 kilometres and then propel itself a further 165 kilometres into space where the influence of gravity on the orbiting craft will be one hundred - thousandth (10 - 5) of what it is on Earth.

Messenger, another NASA craft that will settle into orbit around Mercury in March 2011, has been scanning for vulcanoids too.

Now, Hippke and Heller show that a combination of the stars» gravity and radiation pressure from their photons can bring the craft into a stable orbit around one of the stars, then around the tantalising planet (Astrophysical Journal Letters, doi.org/bx8t).

Real defense needs a bigger craft to divert a large asteroid into a safe solar orbit.

The Trace Gas Orbiter has reached its final orbit after a year of «aerobraking» that ended in February.This exciting operation saw the craft skimming through the very top of the upper atmosphere, using drag on its solar wings to transform its initial highly elliptical four - day orbit of about 200 x 98 000 km into the final, much lower and near - circular path at about 400 km.

The engines will ignite and burn for 33 minutes to slow the craft, allowing it to be pulled into an elliptical orbit with a period of 35 hours.

The craft carried the Cassini orbiter, which would eventually be placed into Saturn's orbit, and the Huygens probe, destined for Titan.

The craft was launched without any passengers and settled into orbit just below the International Space Station.