orbiter

Last month, Japan stole a bit of China's thunder by launching its own lunar probe, and India plans its own lunar orbiter next year.

Another lander and orbiter are scheduled to be launched next year, but at least part of the mission is now in doubt.

So far, things have been going just as planned for China's nascent moon program, which launched a second orbiter last October.

In two thousand seven China launched its first moon orbiter. India followed the next year with its own scientific mission.

The ice is surprisingly pure and easy to see in high-resolution pictures from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

But scientists decided to let it carry out additional exploratory tasks as the orbiter is still in good condition and has fuel in reserve.

In a mission status report, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter resumed science operations on Tuesday.

Zhai appeared to struggle with the hatch and a fire alarm was triggered in the orbiter as he began the spacewalk.

Some said the earth-imaging orbiter, launched three years ago, wanted to emigrate, just as many Egyptians do.

The orbiter lifts off vertically like an Expendable launch vehicle but makes an unpowered descent similar to a glider.

Officials say the orbiter has so far achieved all the pre-set goals and is expected to carry out further research.

The probe, called Phoenix, announced the news in a radio signal that was picked up by an overhead orbiter and beamed back to Earth.

State broadcaster CCTV showed live images of Zhigang as he floated out of the orbiter module's hatch.

Another orbiter, Mars Odyssey, periodically flew over the lander's location and tuned in to any potential radio communications.

China has since launched a second manned mission and announced plans for a lunar orbiter to be launched sometime this year.

The orbiter unexpectedly rebooted its computer on June 3, and engineers brought it out of standby mode on June 6, NASA said.

"We have greater control over the orbiter than we used to, " says Clinton Dorris, deputy manager of the Altair lander program.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is part of a fleet of satellites, landers and rover that have dispatched to the Red Planet for studies.

The orbiter will carry a module filled with 8, 640 pounds of supplies, enough to keep the station crew provisioned for as long as a year.

The orbiter disintegrated as it returned to Earth -- the first accident since the 1986 Challenger explosion.

Since Americans still need access to space, the shuttle would be replaced with an updated Apollo-style orbiter.

The orbiter is the part of the shuttle that looks like an airplane.

Each orbiter is configured differently for every mission, according to what the astronauts want to see displayed in each window.

The orbiter was launched and went into orbit last week.

More than two thirds of the nation want to see the launch of Chang'e I, China's first lunar orbiter live on TV, according to a survey.

A compelling demonstration of its existence or absence may be reached from gravity and altimetry data in the proposed Europa orbiter.

The ship also will release a satellite that will circle the orbiter and send back images to mission command.

But in launch position, the orbiter is perched on the side of its 15-story external fuel tank and flanked by two solid rocket boosters.

BOB DOUGHTY: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter studied many mountain slopes across the planet's southern hemisphere.

The computer abruptly levels the craft's glide , and the orbiter sinks toward the runway like a conventional airplane.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera captured this image as part of a calibration exercise.

Over the next three to four years the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will build a detailed map of the moon's surface.

The orbiter named Chang'e after a Chinese Goddess is expected to spend a year analyzing the moon surface.

Scientists hope to have more information about the caves when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter passes over the region.

At first, mission controllers said they were fairly certain that none of the insulation had struck the orbiter.

The orbiter looks like an airplane, it carries the crew.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found the best evidence yet that liquid water flows on Mars during the planet's warm season.

Faced with the Americans' uncertainty, European Space Agency member states decided not to issue an industrial contract to build the orbiter.

Seen here after rolling back before Thursday's shuttle launch, the RSS provides pre-launch access to the orbiter and its payload.

Each orbiter was designed to be reused up to 100 times.

Professor McEwen says a flow of briny, or salty, water is the best explanation for the orbiter's observations.

The launch had to be postponed earlier this month because of the failed launch of an experimental orbiter.

China's lunar orbiter is to be followed by a lander and then, by 2017, a robotic mission to return moon rocks.

The shuttle orbiter is visible on the image right, attached to a brown liquid fuel tank and two white solid rocket boosters .

"It's an improvement, " said Steve Stich, the head of the orbiter project office at Johnson Space Center.

The orbiter will provide first-hand knowledge about the Moon and built a sound foundation for the next phases of the program.

Both images were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Fourteen new faults have been been spotted in high-resolution images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The impact of LCROSS was monitored by a second probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Last month, the Space Shuttle orbiter Atlantis visited the ISS and added components that included the Columbus Science Laboratory.

In 2007, pictures from a Mars orbiter showed dark holes that appear to be places where lava-tube roofs have collapsed.

NASA also uses them as chase planes for the space shuttle orbiter as well as for astronaut training.

Whereas Galileo released a probe to investigate Jupiter's atmosphere, the Cassini orbiter will send the Huygens probe to Titan, not Saturn.

It was yet another delay after the orbiter was taken to the assembly building a day late because of a broken water main.

Recent news columns have commemorated the retirement of the Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery.

Two of Saturn's moons appear to form a conjoined world in an image from NASA's Cassini orbiter released September 24.

This picture was taken during the shuttle orbiter Endeavour's mission to expand the space station last August.

Only one will actually leave the orbiter module to retrieve scientific experiments placed outside.

NASA orbiter has spotted the signature of clays and other hydrated minerals in and around Endeavour.

The bolts ensure that the fuel tank separates from the orbiter after the craft pierces the atmosphere.

Combining these results with the images from the orbiter and the Huygens probe may help determine the extent of methane precipitation.

A lander would pick them up and then rendezvous with an orbiter to bring them back to Earth.

After that , space station partners will rely on Russian and private launch vehicles to ferry supplies to the orbiter .

Each such mega-orbiter might produce 5 gigawatts of power, more than twice the output of a Hoover Dam.

The huge rocket that lifted the orbiter from Earth dropped into the Atlantic Ocean after about four minutes.

This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in August 2009.

The team proposed the theory after studying data from the Thermal Emission Imaging System on the Mars Odyssey orbiter.

The Imperial College researchers used images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to analyse the lakes.

The orbiter is programmed to go into safe mode when it encounters an unknown event.

Operations of Chang'e-2 remained normal on Friday and the orbiter has captured a great amount of scientific data since its launch.

The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars-orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the above image in late July.

orbiter Something that orbits, especially a spacecraft that orbits a planet or moon without landing on it.

This Missourian national space museum Stephen F Virginia would get this discovery on the most traveled orbiter.

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japan is set to launch its first lunar orbiter this summer, but exploring the moon is just part of the mission.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is NASA's most powerful spacecraft currently in orbit around Mars.

This image was generated the by Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or MOLA, an instrument that was aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.

In September of 2002, Discovery was ready for its second Orbiter Major Modification (OMM) period for maintenance and upgrades.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during a routine tracking of seasonal changes. The probe arrived at the planet in 2006.

No, I am not referring to the mainland's stock market but to Wednesday evening's launch of the country's first lunar orbiter.

Atlantis was the first orbiter to undergo numerous modifications during a 10-month major overhaul in 1998.

On the Space Shuttle, food is prepared at a galley installed on the orbiter's mid-deck.

The lunar orbiter will map the moon's surface from orbit in unsurpassed resolution, capturing even the tracks that lunar rovers left behind.

At the Web site moonzoo. org, you can check out new high-resolution images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter Camera.

Once on the ground, the orbiter will be decommissioned and prepared for public display in Los Angeles.

Space shuttle Discovery's tail fin clears the hangar door of Orbiter Processing Facility-2 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The orbiter is also used to analyse more active regions.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured some images of the far side (the southern hemisphere) of the moon.

The orbiter and its carrier rocket left the ground at 6: 05pm local time as scheduled.

Accompanying the orbiter, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will drop two impactors into the south pole of the moon.

Japan is scheduled to launch its first Venus climate orbiter in 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

Accompanying the orbiter, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will drop two impactors into the south pole of the moon.

Japan is scheduled to launch its first Venus climate orbiter in 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in Aprl 2008.

To raise public awareness, JAXA is conducting a "Wish Upon the Moon" campaign that allows people to send brief messages up with the orbiter.

Upon Atlantis's return to earth, scheduled for July 20, the orbiter will be prepared for retirement at the space center.

The image was taken in 1966 by Lunar Orbiter 1 and heralded by then-journalists as the Image of the Century.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circumnavigating its namesake planet since early 2006.

Explanation: When dawn broke over Kennedy Space Center on Monday, May 16, the space shuttle orbiter Endeavour still stood on pad 39A.

Nasa has high-quality images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, most of which are simply filed.

At midnight Commander Alan G. Poindexter and Dutton will fire shuttle jets to refine the orbiter's approach to the station.

At midnight Commander Alan G. Poindexter and Dutton will fire shuttle jets to refine the orbiter's approach to the station.

Friday's ascent would be the 135th and last in the 30-year orbiter programme.

Summer was approaching in the Northern Hemisphere on June 12, 2010, when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter looked home to acquire this image.

These include the shuttle orbiter's main engines.

When the orbiter returns from space, it lands at Kennedy Space Center.

The latest findings were based on satellite images taken by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

A self-test consists of one engineer in the orbiter and one in the firing room.

Upon completion of the Lunar Orbiter 5 mission, the moon's surface had been 99 percent mapped.

That failure, combined with the loss of the companion Mars orbiter, prompted NASA to cancel a 2001 lander mission.

Would the data get back to the orbiter?

Would the data get back to the orbiter?

The tapes contain raw data sent back from the five Lunar Orbiter missions in the 1960s.

Four seconds after eight they saw a large piece leave the orbiter and fall away.

The country launched a lunar orbiter in 2007 with the possibility of a manned mission to the moon by 2020.

Meals are stowed aboard the orbiter in locker trays with food packages arranged in the order they will be used.

View of Valles Marineris, using wide-angle imagery from NASA's Viking orbiters and the Mars Orbiter Camera.

Next week should see its first Mars orbiter - Yinghuo-1 - begin its journey to the Red Planet.

In 1986, the orbiter Challenger met an untimely end, exploding 73 seconds after lift-off.

China plans to launch a lunar orbiter called "Chang'e One" in the second half of 2007.

The time since then has been devoted to getting the orbiter's cameras and other instruments back on the job.

The time since then has been devoted to getting the orbiter's cameras and other instruments back on the job.

Chinese Long March 3C rocket stands poised to launch China's second moon mission, theChang'e 2 lunar orbiter, on Oct.

In orbit around the Moon, the orbiter was about 372, 335 kilometers from Earth.

Over six months, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took 1, 700 pictures of the moon's polar region.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has pinpointed the highest location on the moon.

The 5, 070-pound (2, 300-kilogram) orbiter relayed communication and photographed the planet in ultraviolet light.

Chang'e 1 Lunar orbiter will achieve the ancient dream of the Chinese.

A side view of the Breitling Orbiter 3.

AFTER HUYGENS'S DESCENT, the Cassini orbiter will continue to study Titan during its four-year tour of the Saturnian system.

This photo reveals the first view of Earth from the moon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 23, 1966.

Plans for a lunar orbiter launch in 2007 were included in China's white paper on its space program, unveiled last year.

A European-led orbiter to study trace gases, including methane, in Mars' atmosphere.

Unlike Galileo or Voyager, the Cassini orbiter has no moving platforms for pointing its instruments;

Industry says the timetable for construction for the joint missions, particularly for the orbiter, is tight if launch dates are to be met;

Simulation Analysis of the Short-Arc Orbital Determination Accuracy for a Lunar Orbiter

Effects of Real Gas on Aerodynamic Characteristics of a Hypersonic Orbiter

astro advanced spacecraft truck , trainer , transport reusable orbiter

Simulation of Precise Orbit Determination for a Lunar Orbiter

The Mars Telecommunications Orbiter spacecraft

the orbiter will continue to explore saturn and its moons for four more year

the orbiter was designed to circle venus at varying heights above the planet ' s atmosphere

lunar probe; lunar exploration satellite; lunar orbiter

Surface of the Red Planet: images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite

Lunar Orbiter Project Entering A Critical Stage

The first spacewalk to the underside of the orbiter

In December 1978, the Pioneer Venus 1 probe and orbiter measured argon isotopes in the atmosphere of Venus

Chang'E-1 Lunar Orbiter: China's First Step into Deep Space Exploration

10-Year-old Mars orbiter goes silent