Sentences with phrase «of spacecraft missions»

The longevity of spacecraft missions examining the Red Planet has enabled detection and examination of changes on multiple time scales.

Knowledge about our own Solar System has increased by leaps and bounds over the past few decades due to a combination of spacecraft missions and technical advancements... Read more»

Not exact matches

He said that in September of this year, he would reveal details about a new rocket and spacecraft beyond the current Falcon and Dragon series, which may be used for Mars missions.

«It conducted six successive rendezvous and dockings with spacecraft Shenzhou - 8, Shenzhou - 9, and Shenzhou - 10 and completed all assigned missions, making important contributions to China's manned space exploration activities,» said a memo that China submitted in May 2017 to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

One of the big limiting factors in plaguing future space missions is lifting off from Earth with all the supplies, fuel, spacecraft and equipment humans would need to establish a permanent lunar base or field a Mars mission.

Slated for a first crewed mission in 2021, it is expected to serve as NASA's deep - space exploratory spacecraft for the next decade, potentially carrying astronauts to the moon, nearby asteroids and even Mars or one of its moons in the 2030s.

And when you're tasked with building and launching spacecraft millions or even billions of miles from Earth, on missions that take several years, long - term planning is pretty critical.

If the landing is successful, it will be the first time scientists have landed a probe on a comet, and it will be the completion of a mission that began 10 years ago when the Rosetta spacecraft launched.

When a spacecraft completes its mission or runs out of fuel, it's sent to what NASA calls a Spacecraftspacecraft completes its mission or runs out of fuel, it's sent to what NASA calls a SpacecraftSpacecraft Cemetery.

After six successful missions to Tiangong - 1 — three of which were crewed — China abandoned the spacecraft in June 2013.

For Planetary Resources, the first wave of development is to culminate in a doughnut - shape spacecraft heading on a prospecting mission to a near - Earth asteroid in 2020.

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.

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.

Former winners of the awards include Naomi Mitchison, a senior hardware engineer at Selex ES, Abbie Hutty, a spacecraft engineer currently working on Europe's first Rover Mission to Mars and Yewande Akinola, an environmental services engineer with a passion for innovation and sustainable water supply.

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

But the spacecraft's resounding triumphs in that time and the indisputable logic of keeping such a productive asset at work helped us press the case for continuing Cassini's mission.

But Jeffrey Sheehy, chief engineer of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., and Johnson agree that the technology could potentially pave the way for interstellar missions, in which powerful lasers could accelerate sail spacecraft to a tenth the speed of light or faster.

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.

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

The second mission extension provided dozens of flybys of the planet's icy moons, using the spacecraft's remaining rocket propellant along the way.

Scientists have found the first direct evidence for explosive releases of energy in Saturn's magnetic bubble using data from the Cassini spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency.

Morse said that the number of NASA astrophysics missions in operation had peaked at 15 in 2010 and was now in decline with the phaseout of spacecraft such as the Wide - Field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

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.

Eleven years into its mission exploring Saturn and its moons, the Cassini spacecraft continues to make new kinds of discoveries.

«And this mission would be NASA's first mission that is directly tasked with searching for signs of life on another world since the Viking Spacecraft were given that task back in the 1970s on the surface of Mars.»

«We will have had seven years of experience and practice in pointing the spacecraft,» says Tom Duxbury, the Stardust mission manager at JPL.

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.

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.

No one knows when it formed, but the Galileo spacecraft didn't spot it before the end of its mission in 2003, says Andy Cheng of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

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.

This Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to return to Earth on May 11 carrying, among other things, science samples from the One - Year Mission, in which NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko stayed aboard the station from March 2015 until March of this year.

The mapping of the near - Earth asteroid Bennu is one of the science goals of NASA's OSIRIS - REx mission, and an integral part of spacecraft operations.

As a result, the sun now looks 7 percent brighter than it will in July, but its low winter elevation keeps things chilly in the Northern Hemisphere during the run - up to the premier space event of 2006: the return of the Stardust spacecraft after a six - year mission.

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.

Observations of Neptune from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, operating in its K2 mission, were important in this comparison between the planet and brown dwarfs.

Studies of Mars, for instance, have boomed in recent decades thanks to the steady stream of missions sent there; meanwhile, NASA hasn't sent a spacecraft to Venus in more than 20 years.

For another, scientists regularly monitor the interior of this and other spacecraft, a process that started with the Apollo missions.

Stewart says the study should help NASA's Juno mission come up with better models of Jupiter's interior layers when the spacecraft goes into orbit around the planet in July 2016.

IN THE REARVIEW WINDOW A final image of Saturn's moon Titan (like one shown here from the Cassini spacecraft's last distant flyby September 11) will be among the «final picture postcards of the Saturn system... to put in our Cassini scrapbook,» Linda Spilker, head scientist for the Cassini mission, said in a news conference September 13.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft exited the vast bubble of particles that encircles the sun and planets on August 25, 2012, mission scientists report September 12 in Science.

The Red Planet now has seven robots studying it, following the arrival of two new orbiters in September: NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) and MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission), the Indian space agency's first Mars spacecraft.

The cosmic collision is intentional: Mission engineers need to guide the spacecraft down because they have run out of fuel to keep themselves in lunar orbit.

After having its mission extended for two years to observe Jupiter's moons, the intrepid Galileo spacecraft successfully completed a risky flyby of Jupiter's turbulent moon, Io.

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.

«My scientific life is tied to this spacecraft, to this mission,» says Luciano Iess, a planetary scientist at the Sapienza University of Rome who has led Cassini's radio experiment since 1990.

In missions that use conventional propellant, spacecraft use a lot of fuel just to accelerate enough to get into orbit.

Four years ago, as GRAIL's two spacecraft neared the end of a 1 - year orbital mission with a planned crash into the lunar surface, they measured Orientale from a scant altitude of 2 kilometers.

Decommissioned or damaged satellites, fragments of space stations and other remnants of space missions pose a potential threat of collisions with active satellites and spacecraft every day.