Space Missions - Quiz *new article*

Space missions have taken us to the Sun and the Moon, asteroids and comets, planets, dwarf planets and moons, and looked beyond the Solar System. There have been so many missions it's hard to keep them straight. Can you match these descriptions with the missions?

Space Missions - Quiz

Rosetta the Comet Chaser

Rosetta, the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft, traveled for ten years and billions of miles in order to rendezvous with a comet, accompany it as it moved through the inner Solar System past the Sun, and deploy a lander.

Voyager 1 â€“ Gas Giants and a Last Look Homeward

When a rare planetary alignment opened up the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 was sent forth. It observed the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and their moons. At nearly 4 billion miles from the Sun, the probe turned and took one last picture of home before continuing its journey to the stars.

Voyager 2 - The Grand Tour

Most of our knowledge of Neptune and Uranus is based on Voyager 2's visits. Its grand tour of the four giant planets used a rare alignment of the planets that let the gravity of each one boost the spacecraft to the next one. No other probe has been to either of the ice giants.

Debris, ejected from Cabeus crater about 20 seconds after the LCROSS impact. The inset shows a close-up with the direction of the sun and the Earth.

The debris plume from the impact is small, but spectral analysis did show that it contained water.

Image: courtesy of Science/AAAS (caption by Universe Today)

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Magellan spent four years mapping Venus, producing a detailed radar map of 99% of the planet. It found evidence of volcanic activity over about 85% of its surface.

One of the puzzles it raised for scientists was the fact that the highlands of the planet appeared abnormally bright, while lower elevations appeared dark. Scientists now believe this is because the mountains on Venus are covered in condensed melted metal. The metal, probably lead, is vaporised at lower levels by the incredibly high temperatures, then cools as it rises. It then settles like frost on the planet's peaks to form a thin, highly reflective layer.

Magellan operated for four years before plunging in a controlled descent to the surface of Venus in October 1994.

[from BBC On This Day]

This GIF explains how radar mapping works. Visible light can't penetrate the thick clouds of Venus, but radar can.

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and although not as hot as Venus, it can get up to over 400 degrees Celsius. Yet it has some craters near the poles that never get direct sunlight and they are very cold. There seems to be water in all sorts of places in the Solar System, so could there be ice in Mercury's shadowed craters?

NASA's Messenger spacecraft provided the answer, and the answer was a resounding YES! Here is Kandinsky crater, showing the ice.

One name came up both in regard to Comet Shoemaker Levy and to the NEAR Shoemaker mission to asteroid EROS.

The husband and wife science team of Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker were co-discoverers, along with David Levy, of the comet. At one time Carolyn Shoemaker held the record for the number of comets discovered.

A geologist by training. Gene Shoemaker was also not merely a planetary scientist, but is described as one who

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almost single-handedly created planetary science as a discipline distinct from astronomy. . . . He brought together geologic principles to the mapping of planets, resulting in more than 3 decades of discoveries about the planets and asteroids of the Solar System.

Sadly, he died in 1997 in a car accident in Australia. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission, launched in 1996, had Shoemaker's name added to the its name.

Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut. However he had a health problem that disqualified him, though he did help train astronauts. His wish to go to the Moon was unfulfilled in his lifetime, but NASA's Lunar Prospector mission took an ounce of his ashes to the Moon.

Giotto was a robotic spacecraft mission from the European Space Agency (ESA). In flying by and studying Halley's Comet it became the first spacecraft to make close up observations of a comet. On March 13 1986, the mission succeeded in approaching Halley's nucleus at a distance of 596 kilometers.

The spacecraft was named after the Early Italian Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone. He had observed Halley's Comet in 1301 and was inspired to depict it as the star of Bethlehem in his painting Adoration of the Magi.

Paintings can tell many stories.

Here is an artist's rendering of the Ulysses spacecraft in the inner Solar System. The mission was a joint NASA/ESA project launched in 1990. It was to study the Sun at all latitudes. However during its extended mission it also encountered and collected data on a number of comets.

In order to get Ulysses out of the plane of the ecliptic to orbit the poles of the Sun, it needed more power than any launch vehicle could supply. So before studying the Sun Ulysses went to Jupiter for a gravity assist.

Galileo - named for the 16th-17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei, was a NASA mission. It was launched in October 1989 by Space Shuttle Atlantis, and arrived at Jupiter in December 1995. It was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. Previous missions had only done flybys. It was there when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up and hit Jupiter.

Galileo then carried out the first flyby of an asteroid - 951 Gaspra. It also discovered the first asteroid moon which was around 243 Ida. The moon was named Dactyl. (Dactyls were creatures which inhabited Mount Ida in Greek mythology.)

Wow! I will never not be blown away when I see pictures taken out of Earth, I am even often blown away by the beauty of our planet!

Two interesting facts about India's Mars Orbiter Mission:

1. A very modern thing has an ancient name. The probe is also known by the acronym MOM - apple pie isn't involved. But it has a Hindi name too, Mangalyaan (Mars-craft), a name created from ancient Sanskrit.

2. The mission cost $74 million, which made it noticeably cheaper than the $100 million spent to make the movie Gravity.

On March 12, 2008, the Cassini probe made a close fly by of Enceladus, one of Saturn's icy moons. At its closest, Cassini flew within 50 km (30 mi) from the moon's surface in order to fly through the icy geyser plumes coming out of the fractures on the moon's southern pole. On this fly by Cassini found volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected in the plumes.

Launched in October 1997, Cassini has been active for nearly 20 years and is set to complete its mission September 15, 2017, when the probe is scheduled to descend into Saturn's atmosphere, burning up in the process.

This is an image made from Huygens data as it landed on Saturn's moon Titan.

Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead, said

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The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not. Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan's historyâ€”and perhaps even nowâ€”there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface. Huygens' images became a Rosetta stone for helping us interpret our subsequent findings on Titan.

Fascinating and awesome

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Interesting news from the India Times a few weeks ago.

The Indian space agency ISRO had lost contact in 2009 with its first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1. Now NASA scientists have located it orbiting at about 200 km above the surface.

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Finding derelict spacecraft and space debris in Earth's orbit can be a technological challenge. Detecting these objects in orbit around Earth's Moon is even more difficult. Optical telescopes are unable to search for small objects hidden in the bright glare of the Moon.

Here is an infographic explaining the primary mission of the Kepler spacecraft. Kepler is NASA's great planet hunter and it has found well over a thousand exoplanets and a large number of unconfirmed possibilities.