Showing 6 Result(s)

Kosmos 482 Soviet probe will crash on Earth.

Launched on March 31, 1972, the Kosmos 482 spacecraft was supposed to voyage to Venus as part of the Soviet Union’s Venera program. Its sister probe, Venera 8, blasted off four days earlier, and eventually touched down on Venus in July 1972, becoming the second lander to accomplish this feat. The USSR remains the only …

Hayabusa Asteroid Landing

Hayabusa2 has been eyeing Ryugu since mid-2018 when it first began creeping up on the asteroid that floats between Earth and Mars in an elliptical orbit. The craft finally touched down on the roughly 3,168-feet in diameter space rock on Friday morning Japanese time and fired a bullet-like device into its surface to collect asteroid …

ESA plans mission to the smallest asteroid ever visited.

ESA’s planet-defending Hera mission will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but the smaller of these two worldlets, comparable in size to Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, will become the smallest asteroid ever visited. …

NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity Is Officially Declared Dead

NASA has officially declared an end to the mission of the six-wheeled rover on Mars. Opportunity lost power in a dust storm last June, and all efforts to make contact have failed. “Our beloved Opportunity remained silent,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Wednesday at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, …