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The first spacecraft to explore Jupiter was Pioneer 10, which flew past the planet in December 1973, followed by Pioneer 11 twelve months later. Pioneer 10 obtained the first close-up images of Jupiter and its Galilean moons; the spacecraft studied the planet's atmosphere, detected its magnetic field, observed its radiation belts and determined ...
The spacecraft recorded important heliophysics data in early August 1972 by registering a solar shock wave when it was at a distance of 2.2 AU (330 million km; 200 million mi). [38] On July 15, 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, [4] located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The project planners expected ...
Galileo arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, after gravitational assist flybys of Venus and Earth, and became the first spacecraft to orbit an outer planet. [4] The Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for NASA. West Germany's Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm supplied the propulsion module.
The spacecraft flew by Earth twice; the first time at a range of 960 km (600 mi) at 20:34:34 UTC on December 8, 1990. [82] This was 8 km (5 mi) higher than predicted, and the time of the closest approach was within a second of the prediction. It was the first time that a deep space probe had returned to Earth from interplanetary space. [62]
The first spacecraft to visit an asteroid was Pioneer 10, which flew past an unnamed asteroid on 2 August 1972; a distant incidental encounter while the probe was en route to Jupiter. The first dedicated mission was NEAR Shoemaker , which was launched in February 1996, and entered orbit around 433 Eros in February 2000, having first flown past ...
At 16:06 GMT, NASA launched the Europa Clipper ship from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to search for signs of life on one of Jupiter’s frozen moons. “Discovering life on other celestial bodies ...
The Europa Clipper launched Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket propelling it on a six-year journey to reach its namesake icy ocean world.
A recurring problem. It’s not the first time Voyager 1 has needed to switch over to another set of thrusters in recent decades. Fortunately, the spacecraft has three sets of thrusters: two sets ...