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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: Lander Successful: Carried by Rosetta.
Flyby; discovered Dactyl; first asteroid with a moon visited by a spacecraft, largest asteroid visited by spacecraft at the time. 253 Mathilde: 66 × 48 × 46 (58 km) 1885 NEAR Shoemaker: 1997 1,212: 49.5 Flyby; largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft at the time. 433 Eros: 34 × 11 × 11 (17 km) 1898 NEAR Shoemaker: 1998–2001 landed: landed
One further focus of such investigation—besides the basic composition and geologic history of the various Solar System bodies—is the presence of the building blocks of life on comets, asteroids, Mars or the moons of the gas giants. Several sample-return missions to asteroids and comets are currently in the works.
COmet Rendezvous, Sample Acquisition, Investigation, and Return (CORSAIR) is a concept mission to return comet nucleus samples to Earth for detailed analysis.The mission concept was submitted in May 2017 by a team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in response to the New Frontiers program call for mission 4, but did not pass the initial down selection.
The research team believes an asteroid impact created the basin about 4.2 billion to 4.3 billion years ago and unearthed magnesium-rich minerals like olivine, mixing them into the lunar soil, said ...
All five missions were successful, and 99% of the Moon was mapped from photographs taken with a resolution of 60 meters (200 ft) or better. The first three missions were dedicated to imaging 20 potential human lunar landing sites, selected based on Earth-based observations. These were flown at low inclination orbits.
Montage of planets and some moons that the two Voyager spacecraft have visited and studied. It is the only program that visited all four outer planets. A total of nine spacecraft have been launched on missions that involve visits to the outer planets; all nine missions involve encounters with Jupiter, with four spacecraft also visiting Saturn.
Galileo 's prime mission was a two-year study of the Jovian system, but on March 26, 1993, while it was en route, astronomers Carolyn S. Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker and David H. Levy discovered fragments of a comet orbiting Jupiter, the remains of a comet that had passed within Jupiter's Roche limit and had been torn apart by tidal forces.