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Visuals: On a black background, a stylized, striped "IP" with a golden ring and two shooting stars spinning around it zoom out to reveal "INTER PLANETARY PICTURES, INC". Technique: 2D animation. Audio: The ending theme of the movie. Availability: Its only known appearance was on Stranger in Our House. However, it was plastered by the Keller ...
- Overview
- Cassini-Huygens
- Comet Studies
Exploring the Cosmos
Some of NASA's most exciting and productive missions have been conducted by robotic spacecraft that are able to venture much farther into the cosmos than humans dare. These missions explore the planets, comets, and other objects of our solar system as well as the characteristics of the interplanetary medium that lies between them.
There have been many such missions, but several stand out.
Every day, Voyager 1 extends our reach deeper into space than any other human-made object. The craft launched three decades ago and is now more than a hundred times farther from the sun than our own Earth—over 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers).
Voyager 1 is at the very fringe of our solar system. It is traveling 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) a day and, in the next decade, may pass beyond the frontier of the sun's heliosphere and become the first human-made object to reach interstellar space.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 have studied the planets Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune, explored their moons, examined their rings, and revealed much about interplanetary elements such as solar wind.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is an ongoing international effort to explore Saturn and its largest moon, Titan. The mission combines the resources of NASA, the European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency, and other international experts.
Scientists hope that Titan, as well as Saturn and its rings, may help them understand more about the birth and evolution of our entire solar system.
Titan is one of the solar system's most intriguing destinations. The moon has an Earthlike atmosphere rich in organics and, as revealed by Cassini, it may have oceans or lakes of liquid ethane or methane.
The mission, which was launched in 1997, entered Jupiter's orbit and used the massive planet's gravity to slingshot it faster on its route to Saturn. The spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004 and began orbiting the giant planet. Huygens, the detachable probe, landed on the surface of Titan early in 2005 and recorded data on that moon's clouds and atmosphere before landing and beginning surface study.
In recent years, interplanetary missions have also targeted comets. Many scientists believe that the material that makes up comets is relatively unchanged from the time during which they were formed, billions of years ago when the solar system was young. Because of this ancient nature, comets could provide valuable clues about the origins of planets.
NASA's Stardust mission was the first to visit a comet and return to Earth with samples. In 2004 the spacecraft flew by the comet Wild 2 at a distance of only about 149 miles (240 kilometers), trapping tiny particles from the comet as well as interstellar dust. Though the recovered remnants are small, they could have enormous importance for theories of the solar system's creation.
People also ask
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Jul 22, 2013 · PASADENA, Calif. -- Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.
Jul 18, 2013 · WASHINGTON — Two NASA spacecraft, one studying the Saturn system, the other observing Mercury, are maneuvering into place to take pictures of Earth on July 19 and 20. The image taken from the Saturn system by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will occur between 5:27 and 5:42 p.m. EDT (2:27 and 2:42 PDT or 21:27 and 21:47 UTC) Friday, July 19.
Interplanetary spaceflight or interplanetary travel is the crewed or uncrewed travel between stars and planets, usually within a single planetary system. In practice, spaceflights of this type are confined to travel between the planets of the Solar System .
Viking. In Viking. …Viking project was the first planetary exploration mission to transmit pictures from the Martian surface. Read More. Zond. In Zond. …eight unmanned Soviet lunar and interplanetary probes.
Internet. The interplanetary Internet is a conceived computer network in space, consisting of a set of network nodes that can communicate with each other. [1] [2] These nodes are the planet's orbiters and landers, and the Earth ground stations. For example, the orbiters collect the scientific data from the Curiosity rover on Mars through near ...
