Spacecraft

The intrepid Voyager 2 spacecraft, hurtling through the solar system on its way to a fourth planetary encounter, responded to orders relayed by flight engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Friday and fired up its small rockets to make a course change. The maneuver is one of several that Voyager will have to perform as it journeys toward an encounter with Neptune in 1989.

The elder statesman among orbiting spacecraft will jog past Earth on Saturday, passing closer than it has been since it was launched 23 years ago, and the maneuver will forever change its course. It won't be all that close--1.16 million miles--but that is close enough to set the venerable craft on a course that will lengthen its year by six days. From that point on, it will take 317 days for Pioneer 6 to orbit the sun. The change in course will result from the Earth's gravitational pull.

A mock-up of a space-station module has been saved from the scrap heap and will become part of the Newport Beach Museum of Natural History and Science, officials announced Monday. The space module, a model of what will be a future home for astronauts, was rescued through a collaborative effort of the museum, the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and the McDonnell Douglas Co. The 40-foot-long, 14-foot-high original model of the living quarters of the U.S.

NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft will become the first interplanetary craft that can be seen without the aid of a telescope when it cruises by the Earth tonight on its way to intercept the asteroid Eros later this year. Sunlight glinting from the craft's solar panels should be visible in Southern California about 10:40 p.m. if clouds do not obscure the view.

Engineers said Friday that the Curiosity rover happened to catch a picture of its own ride crash-landing on Mars - a wink-of-an-eye serendipity that some dismissed as a statistical impossibility, but appears to have been confirmed by a thorough review of landing data. The final seconds of Curiosity's eight-month-plus journey to Mars called for a spacecraft to lower the rover to the surface using a "sky crane" - three ropes. The ropes were then cut, and the last of the spacecraft, known as the "descent stage," cast itself toward the horizon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, drastically revising its most ambitious and costly planetary probe for the 1990s, announced Wednesday a plan to send the much-delayed Galileo spacecraft on a six-year odyssey to Jupiter that will begin in the wrong direction.

A Soviet spacecraft en route to Mars is now completely out of control because of a command error from the ground, robbing an international team of scientists of a key player in one of the most ambitious programs ever undertaken to study the sun, U.S. scientists have been informed.

One key scientist has died and several others have retired while waiting for the often-delayed Galileo spacecraft to blast off for Jupiter, but success moved a little closer last week when a probe that will dash through the Jovian atmosphere was packaged for a trip across town. It was a small step perhaps. But for the men and women who have grown gray and weary while waiting for their mission to get off the ground, any progress is to be cherished.

Northrop Grumman Corp. said Friday that it would not appeal NASA's surprising decision to award a multibillion-dollar contract to rival Lockheed Martin Corp. to build an Apollo-like capsule that would return humans to the moon. Last month, Northrop and teammate Boeing Co. lost the contract, potentially worth $8.1 billion over a dozen years, despite having played a key role in the development of the Apollo program in the 1960s. "We don't plan to protest," Northrop spokesman Brooks McKinney said.

A NASA spacecraft on a four-year mission to probe the heart of two comets has apparently broken into two pieces, according to astronomers who believe they captured an image of the wounded spacecraft. The $159-million Contour spacecraft had been incommunicado since early Thursday when its solid-propellant rocket motor was scheduled to fire and boost the space probe out of Earth's orbit.