Here are the orbital altitudes of many significant satellites (both artificial and natural – the latter only being Moon) of Earth.
Category Archives: Space Exploration
Lunokhod 1: The first lunar rover [November 17, 1970]
On November 10, 1970, the uncrewed Luna-17 spacecraft launched (see notes 1) and it delivered Lunokhod 1 to the lunar surface on November 17, 1970. Lunokhod 1 was the world’s first automatic self-propelled laboratory, fully controlled from Earth. With Lunokhod 1’s landing on the Moon, a new stage has begun in the exploration of the …
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20 years of the International Space Station: What we’ve learned about living in space
November 2 marks 20 years since the first residents arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting habitat has been continuously occupied ever since.
Roscosmos is planning to shoot the first movie in space
Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency is planning to shoot the first movie in space in collaboration with Channel One Russia (the first television channel to broadcast in the Russian Federation) and Yellow, Black, and White Studio (one of the biggest independent studios based in Russia focusing on the production of movies and TV programs). The title of the movie will …
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NASA’s SOFIA Discovers Water on the Moon
For a long time, the Moon was considered bone dry. And that’s not a surprise since our satellite has no atmosphere that could prevent liquid water from immediately evaporating into space. But what remained hidden from even the eyes of the Moon travelers, discovered by the probes, orbiters, and observers: there are enormous amounts of …
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Collects a Significant Amount of Material from Asteroid Bennu
NASA’s OSIRIS REx spacecraft was supposed to grab a sample of the asteroid Bennu so that it could be returned to Earth for analysis. The spacecraft grabbed the sample on Tuesday, October 20, 2020, but, it’s taken a few days to actually get photos of the tool. Now the mission scientists at NASA realized that …
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Successfully Touches Asteroid Bennu
Exciting news: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first United States spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid has successfully touched down the Asteroid Bennu. The touchdown and sample collection occurred on October 20, 2020, at about 22:12 UTC.
Soyuz makes a record-breaking 3-hour flight to the ISS
On 14 October 2020, Soyuz MS-17 transported three crew members of the Expedition 64 crew to the International Space Station with a record-breaking 3-hour flight. It was the 145th crewed flight of a Soyuz spacecraft. The crew consists of a Russian commander (Sergey Ryzhikov) and a Russian and American flight engineer (Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Kathleen …
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Moon landing videos remastered
Run by a Dutch restoration specialist who remastering historic videos using Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Dutch Steam Machine (Dutchsteammachine) channel has published remastered Apollo Moon landing videos, as well as some other vintage space videos, and the results are astonishing.
Subglacial lakes on Mars: an oasis for life?
Back in 2018, using the onboard radar instrument MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding), European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter discovered an underground reservoir that is buried about 1.5 km (0.93 mi) under the ice. Now, in September 2020, scientists analyzing Mars Express data have discovered three more subglacial lakes on Mars …
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