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• Elizabeth Howell, Robert Z. Pearlman
Mars Global Surveyor was designed to give NASA another chance to study and map the Red Planet after contact with Mars Observer was lost three days before that spacecraft was due to enter orbit. Launched 30 years ago, the mission was NASA’s first Mars mission in 20 years.
Space Exploration & Science Missions
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In Episode 235 of This Week In Space, Tariq Malik and Rod Pyle speak with Dr. Jim Green about planetary exploration, looking across its history, current efforts and future direction.
Mars Global Surveyor was designed to give NASA another chance to study and map the Red Planet after contact with Mars Observer was lost three days before that spacecraft was due to enter orbit. Launched 30 years ago, the mission was NASA’s first Mars mission in 20 years.
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In an exclusive interview, NASA chief Jared Isaacman discusses Artemis, China and the renewed race to the moon. He says the mission’s implications are “pretty severe,” describing an unusually intense focus on executing it and expressing confidence that the U.S. will prevail.
Astronomers used machine learning to filter starlight from James Webb Space Telescope observations, bringing a distant giant exoplanet into view. The approach offers a way to extract faint planetary signals from the glare of their host stars in telescope data.
The two identical spacecraft launched outside the usual Mars launch window and will use powered slingshot maneuvers to increase their speed on the journey to the planet. The mission’s trajectory makes use of propulsion maneuvers to send both spacecraft onward to Mars.
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The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft has returned its first close-up images of the Didymos binary asteroid system, which NASA’s DART mission struck in humanity’s first deliberate test of asteroid deflection. The observations give Hera an initial view of the target it is traveling to study.
Launched in 1977 for a Grand Tour of the solar system, the Voyager spacecraft have reached a milestone: a “Big Bang” fix has put Voyager across the one-light-day mark. The milestone underscores the distance covered by NASA’s long-running deep-space mission.
A meteorite discovered in the Sahara Desert and dated to about 4.1 billion years old could offer a rare window into Mars’ early history. Researchers say the rock may help unlock the planet’s long-standing water story, linking an ancient sample to questions about conditions on early Mars.
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