As NASA prepares to launch its MAVEN Mars orbiter Monday (Nov. 18), here's a look at the discoveries made by spacecraft circling the Red Planet over the years.
NASA designed these spacecraft for longer-term orbiting around Mars, collecting photographs. Mariner 9, in 1972, was the first to take photographs of the entire surface of Mars. Orbiting missions have continued, including the 2005 launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter could spot ...
In reality, however, the planets are moving at different rates during their orbits around the sun. Engineers must calculate the ideal orbits for sending a spacecraft from Earth to Mars. Like throwing a dart at a moving target from a moving vehicle, they must calculate where the planet will ...
While mankind has not yet realized the full visions of von Braun and others, there have been significant strides in building space stations. The United States and Russia have had orbiting space stations since 1971. The first space stations were the Russian Salyut program, the U.S. Skylab ...
How thin is the Soyuz spacecraft? What is the speed of a geosynchronous satellite orbiting mars? How fast is Comet ISON traveling? How long is the space shuttle Atlantis? How many g's does the space shuttle pull? How fast did the Apollo command module hit the water?
A mission can come to an end in several ways. If a spacecraft is reliant on solar power, as many are, then it may peter out as its panels lose efficacy. That’s what happened to theInSight lander on Mars, as its solar panels were covered in dust carried by winds that built up ove...
“In the permanently shadowed regions near the poles are some of the coldest temperatures recorded anywhere in the solar system,” says planetary scientist Rebecca Ghent, PhD, of the Planetary Science Institute. Orbiting spacecraft have discovered water ice—a valuable resource we’ll tap into if ...
Goal: Get the price for a trip to Mars down to $500,000/seat Today, many people have heard of SpaceX. Few know what SpaceX does. And even fewer know what SpaceX really does. Here’s what SpaceX does: It takes things to space for people, for money. And as we established, here...
NASA will officially declare the mission as over when InSight misses two consecutive communication sessions with the spacecraft orbiting Mars, so long as InSight is the cause of the missed communications. Could anything prolong the mission? If a strong gust of Martian wind blew the dust from InSi...
How fast would a spacecraft in solar orbit have to be moving at the distance of Neptune to leave the solar system? Escape Speed: We know that the escape speed required to leave the Earth's surface is 11.2 km/s, but it is interesting to ...