Sentences with phrase «spacecraft measures»

The spacecraft measured Enceladus» gravitational tug at various points during three passes just 30 to 60 miles from the surface.

An X-ray spectrometer onboard the spacecraft measured the X-ray radiation from the planet's surface, produced by solar flares on the sun, to determine the chemical composition of more than 5,800 lava deposits on Mercury's surface.

Specifically, they analyzed radio occultations — made when Voyager 2 sent radio waves through the rings to be detected back on Earth — and stellar occultations, made when the spacecraft measured the light of background stars shining through the rings, which helps reveal how much material they contain.

Not exact matches

The office, which has always been limited by a small budget and staff, continues to gauge a spacecraft's «bioburden» based on a classic measure — the number of cultivable microbial spores it carries.

Cassini's next and final close Enceladus flyby will take place on Dec. 19, when the spacecraft will measure the amount of heat coming from the moon's interior.

It found spectral evidence for water in ultraviolet and infrared light measured by two separate instruments on the spacecraft.

The next decade, studies of the cosmic microwave background (the relic radiation from the Big Bang) by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, provided a new way to measure the total amount of dark matter; this is the same technique that the Planck spacecraft built upon to come up with its more precise cosmic breakdown.

First, the spacecraft will gather data on Bennu's internal structure by measuring its exact shape, its surface geology and its gravity field.

Bowman said the spacecraft is currently taking science data as well as optical navigation data, which is «very important because it is a measure of how well we are doing on that trajectory to hit that specific point at the specific time that the science team wants us to hit.

In the finished product, when the excavator has filled the reservoir next to the spacecraft, an elevator will lift the soil to the reactor, which will measure only 20 inches long and be shaped like a cement mixer.

Three spacecraft will orbit around the sun and measure tiny ripples in space - time via sensitive lasers.

In 2013, a 1.2 - tonne spacecraft called Chang «e-3 landed on the Moon, delivering a rover that used ground - penetrating radar to measure the lunar subsurface with unprecedented resolution.

The first, named CoRoT - 7b after the spacecraft that witnessed the transits, weighs about five Earth - masses, measuring about one - and - a-half times Earth's width.

Solar pressure force has been measured on spacecraft many times and it's been used in manoeuvres, but never as the single force to propel your way around in space.

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.

Lasers on LISA Pathfinder measure a cube's distance from the enclosure's walls, directing microthrusters that keep the spacecraft centered on the cube.

As the spacecraft swooped 9,000 kilometers above the giant storm, Juno's microwave radiometer peered through the deep layers of cloud, measuring the atmosphere's temperature down hundreds of kilometers.

Also, each spacecraft is equipped with sensors to measure particle energy and position and determine pitch angle — that is, the angle of movement with respect to Earth's magnetic fields.

The global maps were created from data obtained by an instrument called the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), which bounces an infrared laser beam off the surface and calculates the distance from the spacecraft by measuring the time it takes to detect the reflected pulse.

The spacecraft's instruments include a cosmic - ray telescope for measuring radiation, an altimeter to create high - resolution 3 - D surface renderings, radar to search for water ice, and a neutron detector to seek hydrogen (which some engineers have suggested mining as rocket fuel for a future moon base).

In the MMS mission, each of the four identical spacecraft has numerous instruments measuring magnetic and electric fields as well as the motion of ions and electrons.

«We used this radio link between Juno and Earth to measure the velocity of the spacecraft to exquisite accuracy — to 0.01 millimeter per second or better,» Iess says.

Juno carries no instrument capable of directly measuring such asymmetries, but they should manifest as subtle alterations in the spacecraft's motion as it moves through its 53 - day polar orbit around the planet.

After only a few months in orbit, the four spacecraft of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission flew through a region of space where reconnection takes place and measured — for the first time — the movement of the electrons thought to be responsible for the phenomenon.

Three separate spacecraft, flying millions of kilometers apart from each other at the vertices of a giant triangle, would precisely measure their mutual separations using sensitive lasers, and thus be capable of detecting low - frequency ripples in spacetime.

The spacecraft also includes a particle detector designed to measure the interactions between Pluto's atmosphere and the solar wind.

Maria Zuber, principal investigator for GRAIL, a mission to measure the Moon's gravitational field, used instrument designs from GRACE, an Earth - science mission with similar gravity - measuring goals, and adapted the spacecraft's design from that of a classified military satellite.

Instead, radar has been used by spacecraft to penetrate the clouds and map out the surface — both by reflecting radar off the surface to measure elevation and by looking at the radio emissions of the hot surface.

That's darker than the 4 % reflectance measured for Comet Halley by the European Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft in 1986, and it rivals the dark hemisphere of Saturn's odd moon Iapetus.

Both spacecraft continued to measure the properties of the outer solar system in the 1980s and 1990s, including the waning strength of the sun's wind of charged particles and the energies of cosmic rays from our galaxy.

It looks fairly certain that Europe's next Earth - observing science mission to win approval for construction will be Biomass, a spacecraft that will be able to measure the carbon content of the world's forests with unprecedented range and accuracy.

This includes production of aircraft and spacecraft, semiconductors, computers, pharmaceuticals, and measuring and control instruments.

One option calls for a spacecraft that would map the surface in detail and measure the depth and salinity of the buried ocean.

One of the spacecraft's instruments measured neutrons emitted from the surface.

Rudnick had become intrigued by another puzzling finding: a cold spot in the cosmic microwave background measured by the WMAP spacecraft.

As a protective measure, the spacecraft used its large, dish - shaped high - gain antenna (13 feet or 4 meters across) as a shield, orienting it in the direction of oncoming ring particles.

Kirari, which carries an instrument to measure how small vibrations on the spacecraft affect the satellite's ability to direct its laser, was launched on 24 August 2005.

He leaves his spacecraft — and again this is all based on the latest research — he jets off and tries to form a triangle; he brings a laser pointer with him, so he knows he is traveling in a straight line, and also some shaving cream and he realizes when he measures that...

Protective covers and the explosive bolts used to separate them from uncrewed spacecraft have also been left to float away, along with a few lens caps for good measure.

«To measure things with spacecraft we have to have them in just the right place, but the ground stations can measure this stuff almost constantly,» says Walsh.

In 1991, for instance, the Galileo spacecraft revealed numerous craters on the asteroid Gaspra, a lump of rock between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter measuring all of 15 kilometres across.

The figure shows an image of Mercury's surface (left; obtained using publicly available mosaic of Mercury from the MESSENGER spacecraft found at http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/) and a color - coded view of the global crater areal density (right), obtained by measuring craters greater than 25 km.

The record of lightning strikes was compared with data from Nasa's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft, which lies between the Sun and the Earth and measures the characteristics of solar winds.

In 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a NASA spacecraft, began measuring the extremely uniform temperatures of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation from deep space.

Examples include making sure that the spacecraft has no stray magnetic fields that are large enough to keep us from accurately measuring the Martian and interplanetary fields, and making sure that the pointing of the mass spectrometer is sufficiently precise and accurate that the molecules will stream straight in through the inlet port when we're making measurements.

Scientists can also measure tiny variations in the velocity of the spacecraft, as accurate as only one foot (0.3 meters) per hour, by using NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to track the radio signal coming from Dawn.

It does this by measuring changes in the distance between its two identical spacecraft to one - hundredth the width of a human hair.

But because no spacecraft had ever passed through the region before, Cassini engineers oriented the spacecraft so that its 13 - foot - wide (4 - meter - wide) antenna pointed in the direction of oncoming ring particles, shielding its delicate instruments as a protective measure during its April 26 dive.

Radio telescopes, including major facilities of the National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, have provided data needed to measure the winds encountered by the Huygens spacecraft as it descended through the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan last month — measurements feared lost because of a communication error between Huygens and its mother ship Cassini.

Since 22 September 2014, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) spacecraft has been measuring and mapping the outer atmosphere of Mars.