Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Because of the proximity of the Mars moons to Mars, any mission to them may also be considered a mission to Mars from some perspectives. Past missions Three missions to land on Phobos have been launched; the Soviet Phobos program in the late 1980s saw the launch of Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 , while the Russian Fobos-Grunt sample return mission was ...
A single rocket launch is sufficient for inclusion in the table, as long as the site is properly documented through a reference. Missile locations with no launches are not included in the list. Proposed and planned sites and sites under construction are not included in the main tabulation, but may appear in condensed lists under the tables.
It is named after Goldstone, California, a nearby gold-mining ghost town. [ 4 ] The station is one of three [ 5 ] satellite communication stations in the NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program’s Deep Space Network (DSN), whose mission is to provide the vital two-way communications link that tracks and controls interplanetary ...
Tracking vehicles in low Earth orbits (LEO) is quite different from tracking deep space missions. Deep space missions are visible for long periods of time from a large portion of the Earth's surface, and so require few stations (the DSN uses only three, as of February 20, 2010). These few stations, however, require the use of huge antennas and ...
View from the Earth's north pole, showing the field of view of the main DSN antenna locations. Once a mission gets more than 30,000 km (19,000 mi) from Earth, it is always in view of at least one of the stations. Tracking vehicles in deep space is quite different from tracking missions in low Earth orbit (LEO). Deep space missions are visible ...
The mission's scientific objective was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission was part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking program landers in 1976; and Mars Pathfinder probe in 1997. [citation needed]
The first crewed Mars Mission, which would include sending astronauts to Mars, orbiting Mars, and returning to Earth, is proposed for the 2030s. [ 2 ] [ 50 ] [ 51 ] [ 52 ] Technology development for US government missions to Mars is underway, but there is no well-funded approach to bring the conceptual project to completion with human landings ...
The data from Mariner 9 and Viking allowed better maps of Mars to be made, and the Mars Global Surveyor mission, which launched in 1996 and operated until late 2006, produced complete, extremely detailed maps of the Martian topography, magnetic field and surface minerals. [237] These maps are available online at websites including Google Mars.