Sentences with phrase «on orbiting spacecraft»

Spectrometers on orbiting spacecraft and on the MER rovers Spirit and Opportunity have previously seen indications that small quantities of carbonates were present in martian soil, but spectroscopic analysis is often a bit of a guessing game.

Not exact matches

«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.

On July 20, 2016, Moon Express became the first company to receive U.S. government approval to send a robotic spacecraft beyond traditional Earth orbit and to the Moon.

NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft orbited Mercury for four years before its planned plunge and crash into the planet's surface on April 30, 2015.

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.

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.

NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin blasted into orbit on board a Russian Soyuz TMA - 22 spacecraft

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.

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.

Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft launched on the Space Launch System (SLS) would rendezvous with the captured asteroid mass in lunar orbit and collect samples for return to Earth.

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.

Astronauts will travel aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, launched on the Space Launch System rocket, to rendezvous in lunar orbit with the captured 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.

It occurred to me to put a spacecraft on a continuous orbit, where it would swing by Earth, then swing by the moon, then continue to cycle back and forth.

«The fourth spacecraft, Kosmos 2499, is making regular changes to its orbit, including making a visit on 28 October to the Briz - M rocket stage that launched it,» he says.

The spacecraft entered its science orbit around the moon's equator on Nov. 20, and in March 2014, LADEE extended its mission operations following a highly successful 100 - day primary science phase.

On November 14th 1971 NASA's Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another planet.

As the spacecraft plunged through these orbits, a radio telescope in Argentina, run by the European Space Agency, NASA's partner on the mission, listened for tiny Doppler shifts in Cassini's signal.

On March 7, the spacecraft snapped a series of portraits (one shown above) of Pan, Saturn's small moon that orbits within a 325 - kilometer - wide gap in one of the planet's rings.

Dawn's ion engine, by contrast, has to accelerate the spacecraft continuously for months on end, spiraling outward until its trajectory matches Vesta's orbit.

«It's hard not to anthropomorphize the spacecraft,» says Matthew Tiscareno of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who has been working on Cassini since it entered Saturn's orbit in 2004.

The European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder spacecraft took off from Kourou, French Guiana at 01:04 local time on 3 December, one day later than planned due to a technical issue with the Vega rocket that carried it into orbit.

Engineers also will have to decide whether to focus on protecting today's operational spacecraft over the next decade or two or protecting craft that may orbit a century from now.

But for this dance Cassini needed a partner, something else orbiting Saturn that could give the spacecraft a hefty boost of trajectory - tweaking, fuel - saving momentum on a regular basis.

Researchers say the spacecraft fleet currently orbiting the Red Planet are aging and there are no replacements in the works, imperiling future Mars landers, rovers and even possible human missions that will depend on orbiters to talk to Earth.

The spacecraft was sent to a halo orbit around a sun — Earth libration point, L1, which sits nearly a million miles into space on a line from Earth toward the sun.

This picture was taken by NASA's Cassini probe on 19 July, while the spacecraft's orbit took it into the shadow of Saturn — meaning that the Sun was eclipsed by the gas giant.

If you parked a spacecraft in a halo orbit, you could look down on the moon, back at Earth, or in toward the sun and stay there for years with minimal fuel to keep the spacecraft in orbit, a task mission designers call station - keeping.

As New Scientist went to press, the launch on Tuesday from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands appeared to have gone without a hitch, inserting the RazakSAT spacecraft into a near - equatorial orbit at an altitude of 695 kilometres.

The chemical fingerprints of a long - vanished ocean on Mars may have been found in data from the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft, boosting hopes that the planet could once have supported life.

At 1 A.M. Eastern time on July 16, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will become the first man - made probe to enter orbit around a so - called main - belt asteroid.

The spacecraft's ion engines will bring it to a capture orbit around this 590 mile diameter dwarf planet on March 6th, 2015 — at a distance some 2.5 times further from the Sun than the Earth.

Over the course of a month, five expanding disklike depressions appeared on the surface of 67P / Churyumov - Gerasimenko in images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft, which has been orbiting 67P since August 2014 (SN: 9/6/14, p. 8).

This has astrobiologists salivating at the arrival of NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which will begin orbiting Ceres on 6 March.

Because the launch window was only 30 seconds, mission controllers did not have time to analyze the issue and get the United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory - 2 (OCO - 2) spacecraft back on track for launch this morning.

For an orbiting spacecraft, the trick is to get — and stay — on the right track.

And while material spewing from the icy visitor probably won't trigger the colossal meteor showers on the Red Planet that some scientists predicted, dust and water vapor may still slam into Mars, briefly heating up its atmosphere and threatening orbiting spacecraft.

The moon, planets, and spacecraft all «ride» these orbits like railroad cars ride on their tracks.

Venkat has found bugs in the spacecraft - assembly facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida; on hardware and in drinking water from the International Space Station; in circuit boards destined for an upcoming mission to Europa; and on the metal surface of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since October 2001.

Although the spacecraft was lifted into Earth orbit faultlessly, it then failed to respond to commands from the ground and did not ignite its booster rockets which would set it on course for Phobos.

The spacecraft would carry six astronauts; three would land on the surface, while three would remain in orbit around Mars.

Almost 8 centuries later, a relatively young crater — dubbed Giordano Bruno, after the heretic who was burned at the stake in Rome for arguing that planets orbit other stars — was discovered on the far side of the moon by the Soviet spacecraft Lunik III.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has spotted an amino acid on the comet it orbits — confirming that a ball of ice and dust can hold a major building block of life.

But there was nothing disappointing about what the astronauts saw as the spacecraft coasted around from the lunar far side on its fourth orbit: Earth, rising beyond the battered horizon, so tiny that the men could hide it behind an outstretched thumb.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has spotted an amino acid on the comet it orbits — confirming that a ball of ice and dust can hold one of life's major building blocks.

Observations of Callisto's near - space environment by instruments on board the spacecraft Galileo, which is orbiting Jupiter, lead us to believe that there is such a sub-surface ocean.

Specifically, the paper reported that at lunar - resonant orbits, perturbations from the gravitational tug - and - pull exerted on spacecraft by the Moon and Earth are roughly zero, especially if the spacecraft's apogee is about 90 degrees with respect to the Moon.

A second contracted flight for the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station will be twice as nice for researchers working with investigations on the orbiting laboratory.

Launched on 20 May, the mission was going smoothly until the ground crew had trouble reestablishing communications after the spacecraft passed behind Venus during its orbit injection maneuver yesterday.

The work is based on data gathered by GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory), a pair of NASA spacecraft that orbited the moon in 2012.