Tag Archives: Mars

NASA: Ten Years of Space Exploration

The past decade has been pretty exciting in the realm of space exploration. Here’s my look at NASA’s milestones in the past ten years.
NASA 2009 Year in Review
October 2009: water discovered on the moon by the LCROSS mission.
July 2009: 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing
May 2009: Hubble Space Telescope upgraded and repaired. Space walking astronauts from the Atlantis space shuttle gave the aging space telescope several new updated systems. Two new instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph were installed, while repairs were made to the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Space [...]

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NASA 2008 Year in Review

NASA has a great end-of-year review on their website nasa.gov.  The space agency achieved some great accomplishments in 2008:  A Mars landing with the Phoenix Lander, stunning photographs from other planets in our solar system, major additions to the International Space Station, a joint lunar science mission with India, progressed toward the goal of returning astronauts to the moon, and celebrated two important anniversaries.
NASA celebrated the tenth year in operation of the International Space Station (ISS), and also celebrated their fifty years of operation as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  The Apollo lunar program also hit the forty year [...]

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Phoenix Mars Lander status update 10-30-08

Mission engineers at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory are looking for ways to conserve power onboard the Phoenix Mars Lander.  The spacecraft has far surpassed it’s lifetime expectancy by lasting into a fifth month of functionality.  It was only scheduled to last for three months after landing in the Martian polar region.
As autumn weather conditions deteriorate and temperatures fall, the Phoenix Mars Lander uses more power than it generates, so it’s only a matter of time before the robot explorer will expire.  It’s a real tribute to the engineering teams how well this spacecraft has exceeded it’s intended capacity for scientific [...]

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