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2 March 2004: ESA: 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko: Orbiter Successful Entered orbit around 67P at 09:06 UTC on 6 August 2014. On 30 September 2016 mission ended in an attempt to slow land on the comet's surface near a 130 m (425 ft) wide pit called Deir el-Medina. Ariane 5G+ Philae: 2 March 2004: ESA / DLR Germany: 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko ...
An interstellar comet is discovered to be on course to impact the Moon and shatter it. A rescue mission gets underway to take the thousand-something population of the base off the Moon, with the support of the L1 space station (near the Earth-Moon L1 point ) and Skyport, a larger geocentric space station.
The largest of the Galilean moons with a radius of 2,620 kilometers (1,630 mi), Ganymede is larger than Earth's moon, the dwarf planet Pluto or the planet Mercury. [209] It is the largest of the moons in the Solar system that are characterized by large amounts of water ice, which also includes Saturn's moon Titan, and Neptune's moon Triton ...
To date, samples of Moon rock from Earth's Moon have been collected by robotic and crewed missions; the comet Wild 2 and the asteroids 25143 Itokawa, 162173 Ryugu, and 101955 Bennu have been visited by robotic spacecraft which returned samples to Earth; and samples of the solar wind have been returned by the robotic Genesis mission.
Vega 2 flew by Venus. [101] Comet 1P/Halley: 9 March 1986 444 days (1 yr, 2 mo, 17 d) Vega 2 flew by Halley at a minimum distance of 8,890 km. Sakigake: Comet 1P/Halley: 7 January 1985 11 March 1986 429 days (1 yr, 2 mo, 5 d) Sakigake flew by Halley at a minimum distance of 6.99 million km. [102] Giotto: Comet 1P/Halley: 2 July 1985 14 March ...
Besides striking the Earth directly, comets pose threats to humanity by colliding with the Moon in Jack McDevitt's 1998 novel Moonfall, where the impact shatters the Moon; [2] [11]: 78 and Susan Beth Pfeffer's 2010 novel This World We Live In, where it alters the Moon's orbit, resulting in weather patterns on Earth being disrupted.
The comet was discovered in the constellation of Equuleus by Father Nicolas Sarabat, a professor of mathematics, at Nîmes in the early morning of August 1, 1729. [7] At the time of discovery the comet was making its closest approach to Earth at a distance of 3.1 AU (460 million km; 290 million mi) and had a solar elongation of 155 degrees.
It is the sequel to Sagan's 1980 book Cosmos and was inspired by the famous 1990 Pale Blue Dot photograph, for which Sagan provides a poignant description. In the book, Sagan mixes philosophy about the human place in the universe with a description of the current knowledge about the Solar System. He also details a human vision for the future. [1]