The
MESSENGER spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral on August 3, 2004 and returned to Earth for its
first gravity boost on the way to Mercury a year later on August 2, 2005. MESSENGER took hundreds of high-res digital photos during its
Earth flyby and they've been sequenced into an amazing
movie of Earth rotating over 24 hours as the spacecraft swung past at thousands of miles per hour.
posted by driveler
on Aug 30, 2005 -
31 comments
Saturn's enigmatic moon
Titan holds on to its mysteries.
Radar images reveal quite a bit of variation but no clear interpretation. The hazy atmosphere prevents the sudden shock of discovery that characterized the Voyager and Galileo flybys of the moons of Jupiter, revealing little more than
fuzzy Rorschach blobs. With less than 1% of the surface mapped, researchers suspect that Titan has a
young surface shaped by processes that have yet to be revealed.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Nov 5, 2004 -
5 comments
Swan song for a great explorer. Tomorow, the Galileo explorer will make a flyby of Jovian moon
Amalthea ending pehaps the geatest unmanned mission in NASA history. Galileo telemetry may not survive the flyby having already receieved much more radiation than it was designed for. Even if it does survive, this will be its final orbit scheduled to crash into Jupiter in September of next year. In spite of antenna difficulties, the spacecraft returned
many beautiful images of Jupiter's moons, along with coverage of the
Shoemaker-Levy collision and the first atmospheric probe to decend into Jupiter's weather.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Nov 3, 2002 -
9 comments
