Sentences with phrase «mission planners»

That's why it's been a favorite technique of NASA mission planners since 1974, when the Mariner 10 mission used Venus's orbit to reach Mercury.

Mission planners hope NASA will launch a replacement to visit at least two comets later this decade.

Summary Experienced mission planner with computer, communications and instructor background.

That means it can drive for no longer than one hour per day, but Arvidson says mission planners should not simply head for the nearest north - facing slope.

That's when mission planners project radio communications will be lost with the two - ton, bus - size spacecraft as it plunges into the giant planet's turbulent atmosphere at more than 122,000 kilometers per hour.

Engineers and scientists will also refine their measurements of Ceres» gravity field, which will help mission planners in designing Dawn's next orbit — its lowest — as well as the journey to get there.

Apart from intensively studying the planet itself, mission planners also hope to use the probe's proximity to the Sun to test the predictions of General Relativity theory with improved accuracy.

Mission planners designed a flight path nicknamed «VEEGA» — Venus - Earth - Earth Gravity Assist.

Additionally, in 2014, a group of mission planners from NASA Langely came up with a mission to Venus» atmosphere using airships.

THEMIS Principal Investigator Philip Christensen and THEMIS Mission Planner, Jonathon Hill of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, combined visible - wavelength and infrared data to produce an image color - coded for surface temperatures of this moon, which has been considered for a potential future human - mission outpost.

If mission planners do their math right, says Purdue astronautical engineer Kathleen Howell, once a spacecraft reaches the right velocity and position above Earth's atmosphere, «you'll never have to turn its engines on.

As mission planners scrambled, they reached an agonizing conclusion.

Genesis — Mission planners expected Genesis to return to Earth on September 8 after 2 1/2 years of trapping billions and billions of charged oxygen, nitrogen, and other ions in the solar wind.

Mission planners knew the dust would smash into the collector at about 26 kilometers per second, so they coated a tennis - racket - shaped arm with aerogel, a porous solid that resembles frozen smoke in an ice - cube tray.

Besides serving as eye candy for Mars enthusiasts, the detailed map will help mission planners select future landing sites where they can most efficiently explore the Red Planet's geological record.

Following its last close flyby of the large moon Titan on April 21 PDT (April 22 EDT), Cassini began what mission planners are calling its «Grand Finale.»

For Phoenix's landing site, mission planners settled on an extremely flat elliptical swath roughly 60 miles by 10 miles (100 kilometers by 20 kilometers) in area.

By sending an empty return rocket that can be fueled in situ, mission planners reduce the launch mass from Earth dramatically [see «The Mars Direct Plan,» by Robert Zubrin; Scientific American, March 2000].

To save on the cost of hauling fuel to Mars, mission planners used a new technique — aerobraking — to finalize MGS in its orbit around the planet.

Now that we've had a look at some of the challenges that mission planners face, let's look at some of the possible solutions that are being tossed around on the next page.

However, to get to Uranus, it might have taken 20 - 30 years and mission planners decided that Cassini was really designed for the Saturn system anyway, so they decided to stay.

Moriarty is hopeful that these findings will give mission planners something to think about.

Friday's test was the second in a three - part series designed to help engineers and mission planners understand how the activities of humans and robots can be coordinated to maximize the reach and efficiency of planetary exploration missions.

Kepler mission planners revived the telescope in 2013, after the malfunction of the second of its four reaction wheels — devices that help control the orientation of the spacecraft.

Not only that, but the existence of such operational hardware will very forcefully incentivize Mars mission planners to use it, rather than grandiose futuristic vaporware, as the basis of their thinking.

To help provide data for mission planners, citizen - science instigator Zooniverse wants to bring you (yes, you!)

After a launch readiness review, mission planners with Orbital Sciences Corporation have opted to delay the first flight of the company's Cygnus 1 cargo vessel, perched atop their Antares rocket, for no earlier than Sept. 18.

Erick Sturm, the Cassini mission planner, was in JPL's Mission Control Center during Cassini's final hours, watching as data poured in from the probe until the very last second.

Mission planners also account for potential variations in the gravity field of Ceres, which will not be known precisely until Dawn measures them.

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.

The sunlike stars had other plans, however, proving to be more variable in brightness than mission planners had anticipated, muddying Kepler's search for the faint shadows.

«Every year the mission planners come around and say, «It's real nice, but [the entire process] has never been done before,»» Clark says.

A rocky planet transiting a nearby star there could be far easier to investigate, pushing Proxima b lower on the priority list of Webb's mission planners.

But now, with its fuel tanks almost empty from all its wandering, Cassini has fallen victim to its own success; to avoid the spacecraft spinning out of control — striking and potentially contaminating Enceladus or Titan with any lingering Earth - born microbes — mission planners are deliberately crashing Cassini into Saturn, turning it into a makeshift atmospheric probe.

JunoCam itself may expire much sooner, as early as this fall, due to the intense radiation around the planet, mission planners say.

Mission planners had hoped to find that boundary, but by last March only 6 of Pioneer's 12 instruments worked, and there was only enough power to operate one of them.

In his look at hopes for a human colony on Mars, Nigel Henbest writes that «mission planners have even considered...

Tomorrow morning, NASA mission planners will begin steering two probes that are now circling the moon to a smashing demise.

The asteroid initiative will incorporate advanced solar electric propulsion technology as a power source for spacecraft, offering greater flexibility to the spacecraft and mission planners.

Mission planners can develop a robust set of abort trajectories should a malfunction occur at any point in the mission.

Solar radiation is sufficiently powerful that mission planners have to account for it — and that means it provides an additional source of balance for Kepler to push against.

Watching this video, and seeing how cool this region actually is, let's hope the mission planners choose this site.

Of course, mission planners have built some extra days into the schedule to account for the small uncertainty in the efficiency of the solar arrays at such a large distance from the Sun, where sunlight will be very faint.

Spacecraft Operations Manager (SOM) Michel Denis oversees a team of 15, including spacecraft operations engineers, mission planners and spacecraft controllers.

Naturally, the slightest hint that the Senator had been launched into space for reasons other than the urgent demands of medical science was indignantly dismissed by the mission planners.

Interestingly, while the mission planners at NASA had anticipated virtually every activity of the astronauts, hour by hour, minute by minute, they had not foreseen the simple emotional power of looking back at the fertile home planet over the barren shoulder of its sterile moon.