By end-2007, Spirit had driven about 7.5 kilometers (4.7 miles) and returned more than 102,000 images. As a result, GOES provide a constant vigil for the atmospheric "triggers" for severe weather conditions such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms, and hurricanes. Among the rovers' many other accomplishments: Opportunity has analyzed a series of exposed rock layers recording how environmental conditions changed during the times when the layers were deposited and later modified: wind-blown dunes coming and going, water table fluctuating. The robotic lander is scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet on May 25, 2008, and begin a close examination of Mars' northern polar region. NASA Official: Phillip Newman The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera on New Horizons should have been able to spot moons down to a diameter of about 1 kilometer. Recorded during evening twilight on January 17, this view features the bright coma and gorgeous, sweeping tail of Comet McNaught (c/2006 P1) over Lake Horowhenua in Levin, a small town on New Zealand's North Island. Melroy and ISS Exp. Opportunity had driven 11.7 kilometers (7.3 miles) and returned more than 94,000 images. These flashes are brighter than a billion suns, yet last only a few milliseconds. What happened on January 17, 2007. These two icons of the Asteroid Belt have been witness to much of our solar system's history. S72-49079 ( 45k) Original artwork for the Apollo 17 insignia/patch. The smaller galaxy apparently has swung into the path of this jet. ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), also an Earth Observing System (EOS) spacecraft, is the benchmark mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. The photos taken out Gene's window are AS17-145- 22192 to 22197. those taken out Jack's window are 22198 to 22222. The Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) instrument onboard the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO . The twin Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft opened new vistas in space by greatly expanding our knowledge of Jupiter and Saturn. A stellar black hole is formed from the collapse of the core of a massive star at the end of its life. The orbiting telescope has become one of the most important instruments in the history of astronomy. The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), launched on August 25, 1997, is positioned in a halo orbit around the first Langrangian libration point L1, where gravitational forces are in equilibrium. Construction projects across the agency supported the Constellation Program, which is developing next-generation spacecraft and systems to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. Get access to our automated daily newsletter, both of our premium newsletters and our premium news stories. A handful of fires in the Bo-Bo region of Chile were detected by the MODIS on NASA's Aqua satellite on January 13, 2007. altitude and 98.73 degrees inclination. The second encounter offered opportunities for new observations of Venus's atmosphere, cloud structure, and space environment. A stunning image . Dawn's science instrument suite will measure elemental and mineral composition, shape, surface topography, and tectonic history, and will also seek water-bearing minerals. featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Entering a highly elliptical orbit around the poles of the Red Planet, it began to change orbit parameters by aerobraking, reducing its ellipticity to a circular orbit at 400 km by end of January 2002. January 17, 2023 Context image. The spacecraft's engines use a unique, hyper-efficient system called ion propulsion, which uses electricity to ionize Xenon gas to generate thrust. NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a stunning picture of stars and their clusters in the vast expanse of space in the constellation Perseus. NASA informed that the evening after the full Moon, which is January 7, the moon will rise around 7 degrees on the other side of the bright star Pollux. Phoenix will be the first mission to touch the planet's water-ice. During 2007, ACE continued to observe, determine and compare the isotopic and elemental composition of several distinct samples of matter, including the solar corona, the interplanetary medium, the local interstellar medium and galactic matter. The sharp vision of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys uncovered the speedy white dwarfs in the ancient globular star cluster NGC 6397, a dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars. The Ozone Monitoring Instrument on the Aura satellite measures the total amount of ozone from the ground to the upper atmosphere over the entire Antarctic continent. Launch activities in the United States in 2007 showed a robust increase from the previous year. Hubble was and is making discoveries at a rate that is unprecedented for a single observatory, and its contributions to astronomy and cosmology are wide-ranging. In 2007, the joint European/NASA solar polar mission Ulysses celebrated its 17th launch anniversary. When its temperature reaches 2 degrees Celsius, the spacecraft will be impossible to maneuver, and the mission will end, probably in 2008. The liquids are probably a combination of methane and ethane, given the conditions on Titan and the abundance of methane and ethane gases and clouds in Titan's atmosphere. Sun Earth Connection Coronal has rounded the Sun and will slowly On August 23, Spirit maneuvered into position for driving up to the top of a rock platform called Home Plate, its long-term destination in a range of hills that were on the distant horizon from its landing site, and in September climbed onto this a plateau of layered volcanic bedrock bearing clues to an explosive mixture of lava and water. The ninth launch, a failure, was the second Falcon-1 rocket from SpaceX, with an USAF Demo payload. In December 2005, the twin GRACE satellites have exchanged positions, and GRACE-1 became the trailing satellite. Comet McNaught. After 20 days and 4 million km cruise, the probe safely landed on Titan on January 14, 2005, becoming the first human-made object to explore on-site the unique environment of this moon, whose chemistry is assumed to be very similar to that of early Earth before life formed. The new observations collected from CloudSat combined with other A-Train observations are beginning to shed new understanding on important climate processes, in particular about (1) cloud changes in the polar regions, and the effects of these changes on the energy balance of the Arctic, their relation to weather changes and their role in sea ice change, (2) how frequently clouds rain and how much rain falls over the global oceans - thus offering insight into processes critical to the cycling of fresh water, and (3) how properties of clouds AND precipitation together change with increasing aerosol, thus offering new insights into how aerosol might indirectly affect climate. Its differential radiometers measure, with unprecedented accuracy, the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). This grouping of two test rovers and a flight spare provides a graphic comparison of three generations of Mars rovers developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. . On September 10, Cassini flew by Saturn's two-toned moon Iapetus and returned pictures which revealed the moon's Yin and Yang nature: a white hemisphere resembling snow, and the other as black as tar. The massive, growing black holes, discovered by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, represent a large fraction of a long-sought missing population. These large fires are about 10 kilometers northeast of the cities of Concepcin and Talcahuano, which are veiled by a smoke from the south. RT @IgnazioMagnani: Guadeloupe ! GSFC Researchers found that all of the jets appear to come from the four prominent tiger stripe fractures in the moon's active south polar region and, in almost every case, in the hottest areas detected by Cassini's composite and IR spectrometer. NASA.gov brings you the latest images, videos and news from America's space agency. They had been too fast for earlier instruments to catch. MESSENGER will be the first probe to visit the innermost planet in almost 33 years. The satellite, later renamed NOAA-M, is part of the POES program, a cooperative effort between NASA and NOAA, the United Kingdom (UK), and France. The largest of the fires (outlined in red) are near the coast, south of the Itata River. NASA Integrates Gear Motors for Robotic Arm on Future Lunar Missions Full Resolution: . During 2007, Phoenix coasted in its cruise phase, which lasts for approximately 10 months. By end-2007, ACE has been at the L1 point for more than ten years, and the spacecraft and instruments are still working very well, with the exception of the SEPICA (Solar Energetic Particle Ionic Charge Analyzer) instrument. Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system and is about 50 percent larger than Earth's moon. The conditions of the early times are imprinted on this light. Two funded agreements were furthermore signed with SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) and Rocketplane Kistler (RPK) for demonstrations under the COTS competition. Preparations have begun for a space shuttle mission to the HST in October 2008, the fourth Hubble Service Mission, for some necessary maintenance and repair work by spacewalking astronauts. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. On the moon Enceladus, Cassini observed jets of fine, icy particles spraying from the moon that originate from the hottest spots on the moon's "tiger stripe" fractures that straddle the moon's south polar region. 04.17.15 - This . The robot explorer will study the history of the water in the ice, monitor weather in the polar region, and investigate whether the subsurface environment in the far-northern plains of Mars has ever been favorable for sustaining microbial life. At KSC in Florida workers erected a new lightning protection system at the Constellation launch pad, 39-B. In 2006, Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, passed a major milestone when it surpassed the 100 astronomical units (AU) distance from the Sun (August 15), i.e., the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, was 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is. All 25 instruments on each spacecraft have been operating well ever since. At end-2007, the twin rovers, nearing the fourth anniversary of their landings, were getting smarter as they got older. By November, the orbiter had returned enough data to fill nearly 1,000 CD-ROMs. In visible-light images, two prominent arms emanating from the bright nucleus and spiraling outward, are dominated by young, bright stars, which light up the gas within the arms. Each unit is movable in two axes to allow for migration of the spacecraft's center of mass during the mission. In 2007, commercial space activities in the United States reached its lowest level since several years, to some extent due to the export restrictions imposed to the US industry on sensitive technologies. In 2007, NASA launched five Earth science satellites, THEMIS 1-5, two more than in 2006, all of them dedicated to one mission: the study of Earths auroras. HST, however, found young white dwarfs residing at the edge of NGC 6397, which is about 11.5 billion years old. Mission scientists are not sure how to explain the gradual slowdown preceding the shock.
