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Technology Development
- New Materials: NASA page
on tests at the ISS.
- Solar Sails: Test of the Planetary Society's Cosmos
1 is planned for 2003; The launch of a precursor sail-propelled
spacecraft is planned for around 2010 (articles from howstuffworks
and NASA;
D. Diedrich's page
at Caltech)
- Space elevator: Space.com article;
spaceelevator.com site.
- Other Propulsion Technologies: Laser-boosted rocket
(space);
Laser-driven microsails (space);
Plasma rockets (space);
Space engineering (space).
- Mini-Magnetosphere Plasma Propulsion (M2P2): Space.com
article,
NASA article.
- Ion propulsion: Spaceref article;
NASA Space Place page;
Spaceflightnow 2002 article.
Planetary Tour Missions (for missions other than these, see
under the individual planets)
- Pioneer
3 & 4.
- Pioneer 6: Launched in 1965.
- Pioneer
10 & 11: Launched in 1972; as of Jan 2003,
Pioneer 10 was 7.6 billion miles (82 au) away, headed at 12.2
km/s for some star in the constellation Taurus, where it may
arrive in 2 million years, and is still sending signals to us.
Pioneer 11 is also headed out, but stopped working in 1995.
- Voyager 1 & 2: (GSFC,
JPL);
Missions to the outher Solar System; Launched in 1977 to take
advantage of the fact that the Jovian planets would be in the
same general direction for a few years; In Nov 2003, they were
respectively 90 and 70 AU from the Sun; In Aug 2006, Voyager 1, the
most distant human-made object, is 100 AU away past
the termination shock (it has been called Voyager Interstellar Mission),
and should
keep operating until it runs out of fuel in 2020 (August 2002
New York Times article,
August 2006 spaceref news item).
Interplanetary Medium Missions (also in the Sun
and Earth link pages)
- IMP
8 (Interplanetary Monitoring Platform): NASA mission
launched in 10.1973 to monitor the solar wind; Important during
the 1990's but less after the launch of ACE; Active until 10.2001.
- Wind:
NASA spacecraft launched in 1994 to study the solar wind and
magnetosphere.
- Cluster II:
Four satellites (Rumba, Salsa, Samba, Tango) flying in a tetrahedron
formation about 600 km apart; launched in summer 2000; their
goal is to map the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind (ESA).
- ACE
(Advanced Composition Explorer): Launched in 1997 to study the
composition of the solar corona, interplanetary medium, and local
interstellar medium.
- Genesis:
NASA spacecraft launched on 8 August 2001; will collect solar
wind samples and return them to Earth in 2004 (CNN article;
SFN article,
launch).
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