Latest Gravity assist Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the Cassini spacecraft hurtles around Saturn along its continuing mission, NASA announced the fifteen-year anniversary of the probe’s launch this week. The $3.3-billion mission lifted off the launch pad on October 15, 1997 and has traveled over 3.8 billion miles since — flying past Venus twice and Jupiter once en route to entering orbit around the ringed planet in 2004. The mission has provided a treasure trove of...

John Neumann for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Eight years ago this month, in 2004, the MESSENGER space probe was launched on a six-and-a-half year, 4.9-billion mile journey to be the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. The leisurely cruise included 15 trips around the Sun, a flyby of Earth, two flybys of Venus, and three flybys of Mercury. During its gravity assist swing-by of Earth, on August 2, 2005, Messenger’s cameras captured several hundred images of our planet....

MESSENGER will complete its 1,000th orbit of the planet closest to the Sun at 11:22 p.m. EDT tonight. "Reaching this milestone is yet another testimony to the hard work and dedication of the full MESSENGER team that has designed, launched, and operated this highly successful spacecraft," says the mission trajectory lead Jim McAdams of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. The spacecraft was inserted into orbit around Mercury in mid-March 2011, after...

MESSENGER successfully completed an orbit-correction maneuver on March 2 to lower its periapsis altitude - the lowest point of MESSENGER's orbit about Mercury relative to the planet's surface - from 405 to 200 kilometers (251 to 124 miles). This is the first of three planned maneuvers designed to modify the spacecraft's orbit around Mercury as science operations transition from MESSENGER's primary orbital mission to its extended mission. MESSENGER's orbit around Mercury is highly...

NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft successfully refined its flight path last Wednesday with the mission's first trajectory correction maneuver. The maneuver took place on Feb. 1. It is the first of a dozen planned rocket firings that, over the next five years, will keep Juno on course for its rendezvous with Jupiter. "We had a maneuver planned soon after launch but our Atlas V rocket gave us such a good ride we didn't need to make any trajectory changes," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project...

  NASA’s Juno spacecraft, on its way to visit the solar system’s giant Jupiter, took a look back at Earth and the Moon and snapped a photo, reports BBC News. “This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling...

On Sunday, the MESSENGER spacecraft successfully completed the first of four "hot seasons" expected to occur during its one-year primary mission in orbit about Mercury. During these hot seasons, the Sun-facing side of the probe's sunshade can reach temperatures as high as 350°C.These hot conditions are the result of two concurrent circumstances, says MESSENGER Mission Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "Mercury is in an...

PHOENIX, March 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- On the evening of March 17, 2011, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft fired its main engine for 15 minutes to perform a Mercury capture maneuver and became the first spacecraft in history to orbit the innermost planet to the Sun. This event marks the culmination of over six and a half years of interplanetary cruise in an ever-tightening spiral toward Mercury, where MESSENGER performed six gravity-assist planet flybys: one of Earth, two of Venus, and three of...

After more than a dozen laps through the inner solar system, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft will move into orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011. The durable spacecraft--carrying seven science instruments and fortified against the blistering environs near the sun--will be the first to orbit the innermost planet.At 8:45 p.m. EDT, MESSENGER--having pointed its largest thruster very close to the direction of travel--will fire that thruster for nearly 14 minutes, with other thrusters firing for an...

As the team of scientists behind NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft eagerly awaits the craft's entry into Mercury's orbit on March 17, we could soon get answers to questions about the origin, composition, interior structure and geological history of this mysterious planet.Louise Prockter, deputy project scientist on the mission, writes exclusively in February's Physics World about the challenges the craft has been designed to face, the early successes of the mission and her own triumphant voyage...