Space Probe

I could only smile and chuckle at Floyd Nassif's and Nat Bercovitz's sour reactions to the tremendous achievement by the Galileo space probe (letters, Dec. 15). Lamenting the money "wasted" on such an endeavor instead of going to earthbound concerns such as the homeless and AIDS neglects the big picture. Just as life throws up obstacles to overcome, it offers up challenges to conquer, each deserving of our attention. As a homeowner doesn't put his entire income toward his house payment, we shouldn't be lulled into believing that all our resources have to go to solving our endless problems.

It was welcome news to Earthlings: The Voyager 1 spacecraft had seemingly crossed a momentous threshold and become the first man-made object to enter interstellar space. "Voyager 1 has left the solar system," the American Geophysical Union declared Wednesday in a news release. An accompanying study published online in the organization's journal, Geophysical Research Letters, also contained an unusually sentimental end note declaring that "we did it. Bon Voyage!" Alas, the elation that spread through news and social media was short-lived.

The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft, the most complex and expensive unmanned space probe ever launched, will be the subject of a talk by the mission's science manager Sunday at the Valley College Planetarium. Ellis Miner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will give an insider's view of the Cassini mission, using slides and videotape to illustrate the probe's progress. The spacecraft was launched Oct.

Russian controllers battled Wednesday to redirect a space probe stuck in a low orbit, raising fear that it could crash back to Earth. The $167-million unmanned Phobos-Ground spacecraft was launched early Wednesday from Baikonur cosmodrome in neighboring Kazakhstan. But when the probe separated from its booster rocket, the engines did not fire to put it on the path to Phobos, one of Mars' two moons. "We had a hard night because for a long time we couldn't detect the spaceship," Vladimir Popovkin, who heads the Roskosmos space agency, told reporters.

A report released Tuesday blamed a design flaw for the 2004 crash of a NASA space probe carrying solar wind atoms back to Earth and criticized engineers for failing to detect the error. The 231-page document prepared by independent investigators confirmed initial findings released several weeks after the crash. The final report found that gravity switches on the Genesis probe designed to trigger the deployment of its parachutes were installed backward.

After a year of circling and taking pictures, the robotic NEAR Shoemaker space probe is set to touch down on asteroid Eros today, the first time any craft has tried to land on a tumbling space rock. NEAR Shoemaker--short for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous and in honor of the late astronomer Gene Shoemaker--is scheduled to begin maneuvers around 7:30 a.m. PST to take the craft out of its orbital path around Eros and send it down to the rock's surface.

As Pathfinder scientists this week continue to rove the rock gardens of Mars by remote control, the JPL engineers who put together that successful mission are assembling a probe set to leave Earth for deep space next summer--a showcase for a dozen new technologies, including the first flight test of an unusual propulsion system never tried outside the pages of science fiction.

About 100 people gathered in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for a peaceful protest against NASA's plans to launch a nuclear-powered space probe to the planet Saturn. The protesters said the Cassini probe would scatter plutonium over a wide area of Florida and kill thousands of people if its rocket exploded during launch. They said millions could be affected worldwide if the probe plunged into the atmosphere when it passes close to the Earth during its seven-year voyage to Saturn. The $3.

After a flawless trip into orbit around the moon, the U.S. space probe Lunar Prospector has started scouring the surface for water, which could prove invaluable for future human colonies. Mission control scientists said Tuesday that the small robot explorer, NASA's first moon shot since the Apollo 17 astronauts walked on the lunar surface in 1972, had established a preliminary mapping orbit after a 240,000-mile journey from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The Pioneer 10 space probe, launched in 1972 and silent for eight months, phoned home from more than 7 billion miles away after getting a radio call from Earth, NASA said last week. Pioneer 10 had not made contact since last August, and although NASA scientists had lost contact before, the silences had only lasted for a week or two. Such a long hiatus probably means something has broken down.

Hours after the Deep Impact space probe flew within about 435 miles of comet Hartley 2 on Thursday morning, images beamed back to Earth revealed a body shaped rather like a peanut or an overturned bowling pin, with two bulbous, roughened edges and a smooth band in between. The images coming in were "just amazing," team scientist Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland said at a news conference. The ice and debris that make up a comet are thought to be leftovers from the solar system's early development, when the planets were still coalescing, said astronomer Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, the mission's principal investigator.

A Japanese space probe has landed in the Australian outback after a seven-year voyage to an asteroid, safely returning a capsule containing a unique sample of dust, Japanese mission controllers said Monday. The Hayabusa probe blazed a spectacular trail over Australia before slamming into the desert around midnight local time, ending a journey to the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa that began in 2003. A spokesman for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) told Reuters the first image available indicated the capsule carrying the precious cargo had survived.

Mercury is not just the solar system's shrimpy kid brother, at least since Pluto was kicked out of the planetary club two years ago. It's shrinking. New measurements taken by NASA's Messenger spacecraft this year show that the innermost planet has shrunk by more than a mile in diameter over its history. Scientists attribute that to the gradual cooling of the planet's core. Messenger, which stands for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, is the first spacecraft to study Mercury up close since Mariner 10 in 1975.

A NASA spacecraft will fly by the planet Mercury today, the first visit to the sun's closest neighbor since the 1970s. The space probe Messenger will skim 124 miles above the planet's surface, the first of three passes before it settles into orbit three years from now. Scientists are hoping that what they learn will help them begin to answer lingering questions about the planet's origin, magnetic field and atmosphere, and what that means about...

Venus became the solar system's baking hellhole by making a classic real estate mistake: building in the wrong neighborhood, according to research released Wednesday presenting the first comprehensive findings from Europe's Venus Express spacecraft. Instruments aboard the craft, which has been orbiting the haze-shrouded planet for almost 20 months, show that Venus and Earth are not just sister planets, but are nearly twins in important ways.

A report released Tuesday blamed a design flaw for the 2004 crash of a NASA space probe carrying solar wind atoms back to Earth and criticized engineers for failing to detect the error. The 231-page document prepared by independent investigators confirmed initial findings released several weeks after the crash. The final report found that gravity switches on the Genesis probe designed to trigger the deployment of its parachutes were installed backward.

Earth has bid its final farewell to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, 31 years after the probe set off for the outer regions of the solar system. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Tuesday it had received Pioneer's final signal last month and would no longer seek to track the now-remote object.

A small space probe that should help scientists understand why Venus, the planet that should be most like Earth, evolved instead into a lifeless hellhole will be delayed for at least two years unless it edges out a couple of giant competitors when the space shuttle finally resumes its flights.

Japan's space agency will delay until 2010 the return of an asteroid probe because a thruster problem put the vehicle into a spin, an agency official said Wednesday. The Hayabusa probe, which is hovering off of the Itokawa asteroid after landing there to collect dust, originally was to return to Earth in June 2007, but that required starting its engine by Dec. 10.

The Japanese space agency's attempt to collect dust from the surface of an asteroid is near failure as controllers at the Kagoshima Space Center in southwestern Japan struggle to regain control of a space probe and start it on its homeward journey. Agency officials previously said that orbital dynamics required the craft to begin its return trip by today, but controllers now say they will not be able to start the probe's ion engine before Wednesday.