Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Man On the Moon

Orbiters, landers and rovers….In 1966, the Moon became the first Solar System body beyond Earth to be orbited by an artificial satellite ( Luna 10), followed by Mars in 1971 ( Mariner 9), Venus in 1975 ( Venera 9), Jupiter in 1995 ( Galileo), the asteroid 433 Eros in 2000 ( NEAR Shoemaker), and Saturn in 2004 (Cassini–Huygens). The MESSENGER probe is currently en route to commence the first orbit of Mercury in 2011, while the Dawn spacecraft is currently set to orbit the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015.
The first probe to land on another Solar System body was the Soviet Luna 2 probe, which impacted the Moon in 1959. Since then, increasingly distant planets have been reached, with probes landing on or impacting the surfaces of Venus in 1966 ( Venera 3), Mars in 1971 ( Mars 3, although a fully successful landing didn't occur until Viking 1 in 1976), the asteroid 433 Eros in 2001 ( NEAR Shoemaker), and Saturn's moon Titan ( Huygens) and the comet Tempel 1 ( Deep Impact) in 2005. The Galileo orbiter also dropped a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995; since Jupiter has no physical surface, it was destroyed by increasing temperature and pressure as it descended.
To date, only two worlds in the Solar System, the Moon and Mars, have been visited by mobile rovers. The first rover to visit another celestial body was the Soviet Lunokhod 1, which landed on the Moon in 1970. The first to visit another planet was Sojourner, which travelled 500 metres across the surface of Mars in 1997. The only manned rover to visit another world was NASA's Lunar rover, which travelled with Apollos 15, 16 and 17 between 1971 and 1972.
Manned exploration
Manned exploration of the Solar System is currently confined to Earth's immediate environs. The first human being to reach space (defined as an altitude of over 100 km) and to orbit the Earth was Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut who was launched in Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. The first man to walk on the surface of another Solar System body was Neil Armstrong, who stepped onto the Moon on July 21, 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission; five more Moon landings occurred through 1972. The United States' Space Shuttle, which debuted in 1981, is the only reusable spacecraft to successfully make multiple orbital flights. The five shuttles that have been built have flown a total of 121 missions, with two of the craft destroyed in accidents. The first orbital space station to host more than one crew was NASA's Skylab, which successfully held three crews from 1973 to 1974. The first true human settlement in space was the Soviet space station Mir, which was continuously occupied for close to ten years, from 1989 to 1999. It was decommissioned in 2001, and its successor, the International Space Station, has maintained a continuous human presence in space since then. In 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded vehicle to reach space on a suborbital flight. That same year, U.S. President George W. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, which called for a replacement for the aging Shuttle, a return to the Moon and, ultimately, a manned mission to Mars

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