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The term "Solar System" entered the English language by 1704, when John Locke used it to refer to the Sun, planets, and comets as a whole. [40] By then it had been stablished beyond doubt that planets are other worlds, then the stars would be other distant suns, so the whole Solar System is actually only a small part of an immensely large ...
The Solar System remains in a relatively stable, slowly evolving state by following isolated, gravitationally bound orbits around the Sun. [28] Although the Solar System has been fairly stable for billions of years, it is technically chaotic, and may eventually be disrupted. There is a small chance that another star will pass through the Solar ...
This is a timeline of Solar System exploration ordering events in the exploration of the Solar System by date of spacecraft launch. It includes: It includes: All spacecraft that have left Earth orbit for the purposes of Solar System exploration (or were launched with that intention but failed), including lunar probes .
The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s. The period required for the Solar System to complete one revolution around the Galactic Center, the galactic year, is in the range of 220–250 million years. Since its formation, the ...
Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), [1] also called Explorer 94 and SMEX-12, [2] is a NASA solar observation satellite. The mission was funded through the Small Explorer program to investigate the physical conditions of the solar limb, particularly the interface region made up of the chromosphere and transition region.
Header of the Discovery Program website (January 2016) [1] Depictions of the Lucy and Psyche missions Asteroid Eros regolith, as viewed by Discovery's NEAR Shoemaker mission The Discovery Program is a series of Solar System exploration missions funded by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through its Planetary Missions Program Office.
In order to leave the Solar System, the probe needs to reach the local escape velocity. Escape velocity from the sun without the influence of Earth is 42.1 km/s. In order to reach this speed, it is highly advantageous to use as a boost the orbital speed of the Earth around the Sun, which is 29.78 km/s.
It does not carry a camera or imaging system. Its detectors measure high-energy particles such as X- and gamma-rays, solar wind, plasma and cosmic particles. A data handling system gathers the scientific and engineering data from all systems in the spacecraft and formats them into a serial stream for transmission.