6 de janeiro de 2014

What about 2014 SPACE MISSIONS?

NASA and ESA presented their main missions for 2014.
More than 24 are active at the moment and others will be launched during this year.





Mission: ROSETTA


ROSETTA is being classified as THE one great expectation mission.
Since 2004 when Rosetta was launched, ESA has been waiting for the right moment to catch an enormous comet, land there and take as many samples and pictures as possible. Rosetta will be the "big star" of 2014, making the first-ever orbit insertion at a comet in August and attempting a landing on it in November. Images will be spectacular for sure! See the film.

In MARS two more spacecraft will be launched and they will arrived at the red planet in September 2014. Japan is also following space targets with theirs HAYABUSA mission.

MESSENGER will go on its mission to Venus and Mercury until 2015.

The twin ARTEMIS spacecraft are still happily operating at the Moon and will continue to do so through 2014.

LADEE is in its prime mission and is planned to crash into the lunar surface in March. No lengthy mission extension is possible for this mission -- its low orbit, necessary for sampling the lunar atmosphere, is a death sentence.

CURIOSITY in Mars has only one goal: TO DRIVE as much as possible in order to explore Mars soil.By the summer of 2014 the rover should be approaching the Murray Buttes, a gap between the basalt sand dunes that will allow them passage to the clay-bearing rocks they landed in Gale crater to explore.

ODYSSEY and MARS EXPRESS have had the most serious problems, but continue to do great imaging and (in the case of Odyssey) valuable relay work. Mars Express' mission is extended through 2016.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has developed a spectacular routine of wider-field imaging with its Context Camera with rapid followup of any new features with high-resolution HiRISE images, so I hope to see more new discoveries of fresh impact craters, possible water-carved features, moving sand dunes, and other geomorphology that shows Mars to be an active planet.

OPPORTUNUTY, will have its moment this winter. The rover's activities will be limited by low power. However, they have found themselves a nice north-facing slope to tilt the solar panels at the winter Sun, so they shouldn't have to park for long stretches; they'll make brief journeys from one north-facing "lily pad" to another, exploring Murray Ridge.

CASSINI, in Saturn in planned to have 11 gravity-assist flybys of Titan. All of 2014 will be spent in an inclined phase from which it can observe the effects of springtime sun on the north poles of Titan and Saturn and image the rings, while exploring the magnetosphere and plasma environment of Saturn in three dimensions. Cassini will not return to an equatorial orbit (and frequent opportunities to observe the other moons) until March of 2015. However, Cassini is currently under very real threat of cancellation. If its mission is to be ended in 2015, then a propulsive maneuver to set up that ending will be performed in 2014, canceling all those carefully-laid plans. So for Cassini the most important events of 2014 will be taking place here on Earth, in the halls of Congress and the White House.

ICE will fly past Earth in August. If we want to regain control of this aged-but-still-perfectly-good spacecraft, we must do it early this year. The budget mess is making that seem difficult to achieve. I'll report if I have any further news on that.

Juno, Dawn, and New Horizons will spend 2014 cruising to their next destinations. The latter two will be setting the stage for a spectacular 2015, what I'm calling the Year of the Dwarf Planet, when we will turn three round worlds from astronomical objects to geological objects for the first time: Ceres, Pluto, and Charon.

Voyagers 1 and 2 will be carrying their missions on, into the interstellar medium.
I'll keep on track of their important goals.
from here

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