Tag: spacecraft

A spacecraft is a vehicle or machine designed to fly in outer space. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, space colonization, planetary exploration, and transportation of humans and cargo. On a sub-orbital spaceflight, a spacecraft enters space and then returns to the surface, without having gone into an orbit. For orbital spaceflights, spacecraft enter closed orbits around the Earth or around other celestial bodies. Spacecraft used for human spaceflight carry people on board as crew or passengers from start or on orbit (space stations) only, whereas those used for robotic space missions operate either autonomously or telerobotically. Robotic spacecraft used to support scientific research are space probes. Robotic spacecraft that remain in orbit around a planetary body are artificial satellites. Only a handful of interstellar probes, such as Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons, are on trajectories that leave the Solar System.

NASA Juno Mission Organized 3-D Flight of Jupiter’s North Pole

NASA Juno Mission Organized 3-D Flight of Jupiter’s North Pole

Scientists working on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter shared a 3-D flyover video captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Those are among the items revealed during the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, April 11. The data had been collected by Juno mission scientists of Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM). Imaging in the infrared part of the spectrum, JIRAM captures light emerging from deep inside Jupiter equally well, night or day. The instrument probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops.

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TESS Planet Hunter Launches this Month Searching Sky for New Worlds

TESS Planet Hunter Launches this Month Searching Sky for New Worlds

Tess Planet hunter is ready to launch next month on April 16. It is supposed to start up from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This planet hunter, a 700-pound spacecraft, is called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS will be on the lookout for planets that could support life, officials said Wednesday. TESS will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and is equipped with four wide-field cameras that will enable it to look for the majority of the night sky.

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Chinese Space Station Is Supposed to Fall into Earth On March 30

Chinese Space Station Is Supposed to Fall into Earth On March 30

China’s first prototype station, Tiangong-1, is supposed to fall into Earth at some point between March 30 and April 6. An out-of-control Chinese space station with “highly toxic” chemicals on board may hit a number of major world cities. New York and parts of Europe are among the most likely targets. In accordance with researchers a number of highly populated cities including New York, Barcelona, Beijing, Chicago, Istanbul, Rome and Toronto could also be hit.

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NASA Hammer Spacecraft Will Save the World From the Asteroid

NASA Hammer Spacecraft Will Save the World From the Asteroid

NASA Hammer spacecraft is going to save  our lives. Asteroid Bennu has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth the 21th of September in 2135. But don’t worry NASA has a plan to destroy it using nuclear bombs before it reaches here. The chances of Bennu actually making contact with Earth is highly unlikely, but the US government wants to make sure that this threat is neutralized. Bennu is currently about 54 million miles from Earth and orbits Sun.

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Space Radiation May Be More Dangerous for Astronaut Than We Imagine

Space Radiation May Be More Dangerous for Astronaut Than We Imagine

University of New Hampshire researchers have recently claimed that there is as a minimum 30 percent more dangerous Space radiation in our solar system than we have imagined before, which may cause a danger for both humans and satellites who venture there. According to the Researchers astronauts may obtain different kinds of space radiation sickness or maybe more serious long-term health effects, including cancer and damage to the heart, brain, and central nervous system indicated Nathan Schwadron, a space plasma physics professor at UNH and lead author of the study.

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New Horizons Has a New Name Ultima Thule

NASA Chooses a Name Ultima Thule for New Horizons’ Next Celestial Target

New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA’s New Frontiers program. It is the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than the Discovery missions. The spacecraft has already visited Pluto, the farthest world any mission has ever been to, and it will explore another celestial body on January 1, 2019. The team named it “Ultima Thule” [pronounced ultima thoo-lee”] for the Kuiper Belt object the New Horizons spacecraft which will launch at the first of January 2019.

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NASA Inviting You Journey to the Sun with Parker Solar Probe

NASA Inviting You Journey to the Sun with Parker Solar Probe

NASA is inviting you from all over the world to submit your names online to be placed on a microchip aboard NASA’s historic Parker Solar Probe mission which will launch in summer 2018. This was the first time a NASA spacecraft was named after a living person, honoring physicist Eugene Parker. At closest approach, Parker Solar Probe will be touching around the sun at approximately 450,000 miles per hour. That is fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in one second. The mission will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions and your name will go along for the ride.

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