Day: November 5, 2002

Categories
Galileo Uncrewed Spaceflight

Galileo takes the Amalthea plunge

  • November 5, 2002

AmaltheaNearing the end of its fuel supply, NASA’s Galileo probe passes one of Jupiter’s innermost moons, tiny, asteroid-like Amalthea, at a distance of less than 100 miles, coming closer to Jupiter and its belts of intense radiation than ever before. This final flyby of a Jovian moon is a punishing one for Galileo: the failure of Galileo’s main antenna dish after its 1989 launch has forced the robotic explorer to store its findings on tape for later playback to Earth at a low bit rate, but in this case roughly half of Galileo’s measurements of the highly charged environment near Jupiter are lost to radiation-induced failure of the tape recording system. The intense radiation also causes enough faults in Galileo’s main computer that the probe puts itself in a failsafe mode and “sleeps” until further commands are received from Earth hours later.

Categories
Mangalayaan Uncrewed Spaceflight

Mangalayaan to Mars

  • November 5, 2013

MangalayaanIndia launches its first deep space unmanned mission, sending the Mangalayaan probe toward the planet Mars. Using the proven Polar Satellite launcher, India’s entry into the field of interplanetary exploration runs up a bill equivalent to only $70,000,000. Mangalayaan – known to much of the rest of the world as MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission) – is designed to survey the Martian atmosphere and examine the planet’s surface from orbit. It will arrive at Mars ten months later.

Categories
Uncrewed Spaceflight Voyager

Voyager 2 goes interstellar

  • November 5, 2018

Voyager 2Launched in August 1977 prior to the departure of its sister ship, Voyager 1, NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe exits the heliosphere, the region where the solar wind from Earth’s sun has more influence than the interstellar medium between stars. Unlike Voyager 1, Voyager 2’s plasma science instruments are still working, so the instrument readings indicating a dramatic change in local space are very clear to the vehicle’s ground controllers (Voyager 1’s exit from the heliosphere in 2012 had been much more ambiguous at first). At over eleven billion miles from the Earth, radio signals take more than 16.5 hours to reach or be received from Voyager 2 at the time of its entry into the interstellar medium, and it is expected to return science data through the 2020s. It will pass within two years of the star Ross 248 in 40,000 years.