Sentences with phrase «of orbiting spacecraft»

Because the Earth is sandwiched between Saturn and the sun, we could never get such a view without the aid of the orbiting spacecraft.

Not exact matches

Then a couple of years later we did the first launch of Falcon 9, version 1, and that had about a 10 - ton - to - orbit capability, so it was about 20 times the capability of Falcon 1, and also assigned to carry our Dragon spacecraft.

Then SABRE will flip to rocket power, taking the spacecraft to low Earth orbit and reaching speeds of Mach 25 — more than 19,000 miles per hour.

The nuclear - powered spacecraft has orbited Saturn for 13 years, and sent back hundreds of thousands of images.

I remember nervously watching in the middle of the night as Cassini burned its engines for an excruciating 96 minutes to slow the spacecraft into Saturn orbit.

And when his Friendship 7 spacecraft splashed down a few hours later, the first American to orbit the Earth reminded us that with courage and a spirit of discovery there's no limit to the heights we can reach together.

«Re-launching a rocket that has already delivered spacecraft to orbit is an important milestone on the path to complete and rapid reusability,» Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said in a statement.

He envisions sending a larger conventional spacecraft containing thousands of nanocraft into orbit, and then launching the nanocraft one by one, he said in an interview.

Any large spacecraft that dips below an altitude of about 125 miles has just a few days left in orbit, Gossner said — and that's roughly where Tiangong - 1 is drifting.

To circle Earth from about 250 miles up, a spacecraft must reach a blistering speed of 17,500 mph, meaning it orbits the planet once every 90 minutes.

There are many remarkable aspects to SpaceX: for instance, the way it has challenged accepted rocket manufacture by making rockets for a fraction of the cost; the way it has become the first private entity — rather than a country — to successfully launch spacecraft into orbit and then return; the way it went from an idea in Musk's head to a company that resupplies the International Space Station and that hopes to soon ferry astronauts back and forth.

Musk added that with the ability to carry satellites or interplanetary spacecraft weighing over 53 metric tons or 117,000 pounds to orbit, Falcon Heavy will have more than twice the performance of the Delta IV Heavy, the next most powerful vehicle, which is operated by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing - Lockheed Martin joint venture.

Our robotic spacecraft systems will collapse the cost of access to the Moon, introduce a new commercial paradigm for government missions, democratize lunar research and exploration, and blaze the trail for commercial space transportation and exploration beyond Earth's orbit.

There's a growing volume of debris in orbit around the earth, commonly called space junk, that ranges from old spacecraft down to tiny flecks of paint.

At SpaceX, Elon is the chief designer, overseeing development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and ultimately to other planets.

Launched in October 1997, the Cassini mission to Saturn included a sophisticated robotic spacecraft that orbited the ringed planet and provided streams of data about its rings, magnetosphere, moon Titan and icy satellites.

After almost 11 years in space and four years of orbiting Mercury, NASA's Messenger spacecraft (which stands for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) has run out of fuel...

For example, the official Soviet propaganda apparatus has made a very big thing; of the statement by cosmonaut Gherman S. Titov that he looked all around for God while orbiting the earth in his spacecraft, and — «I didn't find anyone out there.»

The premise of a ballistic capture: Instead of shooting for the location Mars will be in its orbit where the spacecraft will meet it, as is conventionally done with Hohmann transfers, a spacecraft is casually lobbed into a Mars - like orbit so that it flies ahead of the planet.

Starting in late 2016, the Cassini spacecraft will begin a daring set of orbits that is, in some ways, like a whole new mission.

Astronomers this month announced a similar discovery for an even larger gas giant, reporting that the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, had found that the planet's rotating cloud belts reach roughly 3,000 kilometers below the top of the atmosphere.

Spacecraft screaming along at many thousands of kilometers per hour have to hit the brakes hard, firing retrorockets to swing into orbit.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has had its last close brush with Saturn's hazy moon Titan and is now beginning its final set of 22 orbits around the ringed planet.

The first line is captured, then the orbit of the spacecraft moves the camera relative to the surface, and then the next line is captured, and so on, as thousands of lines are compiled into a full image.

The robotic spacecraft would be capable of approaching the asteroid, characterising it, capturing it, and then redirecting it to a final stable orbit that would be closer to Earth and thus easier for astronauts to reach.

In 2013, the Kepler spacecraft found two with orbits that are aligned with each other but tilted at about 45 degrees to the equatorial plane of their star, Kepler - 56.

But taking along just a little extra fuel can then gently lower a ballistically captured spacecraft into scientifically valuable, standard orbits of around 100 to 200 kilometers like those achieved with Hohmann transfers — or even onward to the Martian surface for a landing.

With help from the public, members of NASA's Cassini mission have chosen to call the spacecraft's final orbits the «Cassini Grand Finale.»

By lining up the trajectory of a spacecraft through those bowls, such that momentum slackens along the route, a spacecraft can just «roll» down at the end into the moon's small bowl, easing into orbit fuel - free.

Scientists don't fully understand what's driving Jupiter's strongest auroras, but data gathered by the orbiting Juno spacecraft hint that the electrons generating Jupiter's polar glows may be accelerated by turbulent waves in the planet's magnetic field — a process somewhat akin to surfers being driven shoreward ahead of breaking ocean waves, the researchers report today in Nature.

The spacecraft is headed to its science orbit and prepping to discover thousands of alien worlds

«Astronauts to bring asteroid back into lunar orbit: Plans to develop a robotic solar - powered spacecraft capable of displacing a near - Earth asteroid towards lunar orbit for ease of study proposed.»

The Venus Express spacecraft, which orbited Venus from 2006 until earlier this year, detected flashes of infrared light coming from the planet's surface.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting since 6 March, took the sharpest images yet of the cratered surface, from a distance of 13,600 kilometres.

That is not a surprise, given the map of hydrogen (a stand - in for water) generated by an instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft and the presence of small amounts of water in younger Martian meteorites, notes Harry McSween at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The new view was obtained on July 10, 2016, at 10:30 a.m. PDT (1:30 p.m. EDT, 5:30 UTC), when the spacecraft was 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) from Jupiter on the outbound leg of its initial 53.5 - day capture orbit.

Spacecraft orbiting other planets won't be any help this time around for the same reason, but another set of instruments will step up: solar observatories like SOHO, STEREO and the Solar Dynamics Observatory, all of which are designed to stare straight at the sun's surface.

This artist's impression is based on a detailed map of the surface compiled from images taken from NASA's Dawn spacecraft in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres.

On July 4, the Juno Spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Jupiter — a planet scientists still know very little about, which generates extreme levels of radiation.

ESA's Mars Express spacecraft orbiting overhead was also watching Schiaparelli's radio signal, but a preliminary analysis of those observations has proved inconclusive beyond revealing the same sudden loss of signal.

SwRI's Dr. Frederic Allegrini, Dr. Randy Gladstone, and Valek are co-authors of «Jupiter's magnetosphere and aurorae observed by the Juno spacecraft during its first polar orbits»; lead author is Dr. John Connerney of the Space Research Corporation.

Scientists using the Rosetta spacecraft — which arrived at 67P in August and became the first mission to orbit and land on a comet — now think they may have discovered the source of these patterns on cliff faces and in deep pits: layer upon layer of rounded nodules, 1 to 3 meters across.

As the $ 3 billion Cassini spacecraft orbits Saturn, it is broadcasting a stream of images and other data to Earth, some 850 million miles away, that show a ring architecture even more convoluted than expected.

The end result was a 2,320 - pound spacecraft equipped with an outsize digital camera — made of 22,000 parts — and a 55 - inch telescope, the largest NASA has ever launched beyond Earth orbit.

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.

The Juno spacecraft has been in orbit around Jupiter since July 2016, passing within 3,000 miles of the equatorial cloudtops.

The European Space Agency recently took these ideas into a more concrete direction by releasing a concept for a spacecraft called Don Quixote that could push at an asteroid while another spacecraft (called Sancho, of course) hovers nearby to monitor any change in its orbit.

Artist's concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon.

Farmer helped select the landing site for Mars Pathfinder and thinks that the Mars Surveyor and Mars Odyssey spacecraft now in orbit have begun the job of meeting the first - stage requirements of finding potential ancient hydrothermal systems — for example, the Mars hematite site at Terra Meridiani.

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.