Old spacecraft never die. Well, actually, they do die, and sometimes in spectacular fashion — burning up as they plunge through a planet’s atmosphere or into the fires of the sun.
Scientists Discover Magma Ocean on Jupiter’s Moon Io
Tag Archives: spacecraft
Museums selected to display space shuttles
Nobody does anniversaries quite like NASA. Launches and landings and all of the other things spacecraft do may be governed by nonnegotiable variables like orbital mechanics and weather, but in NASA’s world, they seem to take a lot of fortuitous calendrical bounces too
Mercury messenger goes into orbit
It’s taken six years and six gravity assists from three different planets to get there, but at a little after 9 P.M. Eastern time on Thursday night, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft finally settled into orbit around the small, scorched planet Mercury.
Mars lander sends photos from Red Planet’s arctic
NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet’s surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern polar site’s soil and ice," the space agency said. The first pictures, which the lander began taking shortly after touching down near Mars’ north pole — the end of a 422 million-mile trek — showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see