Sentences with phrase «robotic spacecraft»

Many will also provide opportunities for longer - duration robotic spacecraft missions.

Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.

2015 was a year in which robotic spacecraft made some startling discoveries, including finding the first evidence of flowing water on Mars and providing the first close - up glimpses of the distant dwarf planet Pluto.

«X-ray navigation could open up new frontiers for robotic spacecraft.»

Jain, 55, is co-founder of Moon Express, a Mountain View, Calif. - based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year.

Although no region of Mars is banned for exploration, international treaties set the allowable levels of microbial contamination on robotic spacecraft destined for other planetary environments.

I hope we will begin to show some of the greater boldness that we showed in the 1960s and 1970s, with missions more like Voyager, Pioneer, and Apollo, using robotic spacecraft where appropriate, where the risk to life can be prevented, and confining our human missions to areas where we can make a special contribution.

Earlier this year, the company unveiled Prospector X, a tiny robotic spacecraft that'll sit in low Earth orbit testing technologies for future asteroid prospecting missions, including water - powered propulsion and optical navigation systems.

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.

Later, using new technologies on the ground as well as robotic spacecraft, scientists like Shoemaker started to track, catalog, and closely examine the objects.

Dunford, a communications manager for a Utah software firm, also calls himself a desktop astronaut, blogging about robotic spacecraft and space exploration.

In a technology first, a team of NASA engineers has demonstrated fully autonomous X-ray navigation in space — a capability that could revolutionize NASA's ability in the future to pilot robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond.

Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long - distance robotic spacecraft.

NASA has selected two missions to further explore past targets — Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and the comet 67P / Churyumov - Gerasimenko — as the final candidates for its next billion - dollar robotic spacecraft, the agency announced today.

Robotic spacecraft voyage to distant planets while giant mountaintop observatories and space - based telescopes probe the edge of the Universe.

The observations were originally encouraged by the Cassini mission, an international mission of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) that will employ a large robotic spacecraft to explore Saturn and its system of 31 known moons beginning this July.

The VLA is also a high - precision spacecraft tracker that NASA and ESA have used to keep tabs on robotic spacecrafts exploring the Solar System.

Moon Express, a Mountain View, California - based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year, just took another step closer toward that lofty goal.

«Of course, before the landing of the Luna 2 robotic spacecraft in 1959, there was concern that the Moon might be covered in low - density dust into which any future astronauts might sink,» said lead study author and Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Robert Nelson.

He predicts that Musk will settle for a less ambitious result, like getting a robotic spacecraft to land on Mars, within the decade timeframe.

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.

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.

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.

The robotic spacecraft would cruise in deep space towards a near - Earth asteroid, using a technology called advanced Solar Electric Propulsion.

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 robotic spacecraft proved so robust that NASA extended the mission twice.

Russia is set to launch a robotic spacecraft to the Mars moon Phobos today (Nov. 8), marking the nation's first attempt at an interplanetary mission in 15 years.

«Robotic spacecraft are usually radiation - hardened to protect against these kinds of events,» said Chris St. Cyr, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author on the study.

Now their multi-pronged plan calls for the robotic spacecraft Chang» e 5 to launch in the second half of 2017 atop a Long March - 5 rocket, land on the moon and collect several pounds of lunar samples, then hurl the specimens back to Earth.

And many asteroid experts seriously doubted that astronomers would be able to find a suitable 8 - meter, 500 - tonne asteroid that a robotic spacecraft could wrangle back to orbit the moon in time to meet NASA's schedule of sending astronauts to sample it in the early 2020s.

Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit.

Short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, the robotic spacecraft made three flybys of Mercury in 2008 and 2009 and orbited the planet from March 2011 through April 2015.

Pluto's transformation came courtesy of a robotic spacecraft roughly the size of a grand piano (SN: 6/27/15, p. 16).

Robotic spacecraft, such as Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager probes, gave us our first close - ups of the gas giant planets in the outer solar system.

Robotic spacecraft are on their way to Mercury and Pluto.

ARM would have sent a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid to grab a large boulder and relocate it into a high lunar orbit for eventual visits by U.S. astronauts.

During its mission, the robotic spacecraft detected flashes of infrared light coming from the planet's surface.

«We're working on the techniques and tools we might use someday to explore a small asteroid that was captured from an orbit around the sun and brought back by a robotic spacecraft to orbit around the moon,» Love said in a statement.

There was also a mock - up of the robotic spacecraft that would be used to capture an asteroid and bring it into a stable orbit near the moon.

Ceres and Vesta, which are much farther from Earth's orbit, are considerably larger than the near - Earth asteroids consideration by NASA for its asteroid initiative, which includes using a robotic spacecraft to capture a small near - Earth asteroid and also remove a boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid.

But while Curiosity's nerve - wracking landing is unprecedented, the sophisticated rover is not the first robotic spacecraft to set foot on the Red Planet.

The first United States mission in history to launch a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid, retrieve samples, and return those samples back to Earth for study just passed a big milestone in its development this -LSB-...]

Also unlike Hubble, it is not designed for servicing by astronauts or robotic spacecraft.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the robotic spacecraft designed to study the outer corona at a relatively close distance from the solar surface, and humanity's first mission to the sun, is now in Florida to start the final preparations for its launch, which will happen on July 31.