Word: spacecrafts
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...SCIENCE SPACE: The Genesis spacecraft may yield cosmic treasure...
Mercury ain't for sissies. Say what you will about the difficulty of sending a spacecraft to a distant place like Saturn, it's Mercury, the first rock from the sun--with its crush of solar gravity and its inferno of solar heat--that presents the greatest challenges. NASA has dared go to Mercury only once before, 30 years ago, when Mariner 10 made three flybys. Now NASA is set to try again, with a spacecraft called MESSENGER, which is scheduled to take off as early as this week on a mission to become the first probe to orbit...
...MESSENGER PROBE A nimble little spacecraft, MESSENGER weighs just 2,400 lbs. (1,100 kg), 55% of which is fuel. It carries a dual camera system and six other scientific instruments, all of which operate on solar power-something of which there is no shortage so close to the sun. A sunshade made of ceramic cloth keeps the hardware running at a balmy room temperature...
...Cassini-Huygens traveled all the way to Saturn and returned nothing but data on the planet and its rings, the mission would probably still be judged a success. Yet the true scientific goods will come when the spacecraft trains its instruments on the swirl of Saturnian moons. It would be nearly impossible for one ship to visit all 31 known satellites in Saturn's litter, so NASA has selected nine of them, both for their scientific promise and their comparatively convenient locations. The exotic names of the chosen moons--Phoebe, Titan, Iapetus, Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Hyperion, Dione and Rhea--hint...
...take more than one mission to bring back the same science. What's more, the lower price means more frequent breakdowns, as the string of bad luck NASA had with its Mars probes in the 1990s painfully demonstrated. The upside of flying economy is that if one spacecraft is lost, it's a relatively small matter to cobble together another. That thrift-shop technology has succeeded in getting three rovers onto the surface of Mars and will be at work again this summer when NASA launches the MESSENGER probe for a 2008 rendezvous with Mercury, and in 2006 when...