Tag: APL
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NASA, SpaceX launch IMAP and rideshare payloads to study space weather at L1
NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the agency’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) from Florida on Wednesday morning. Joining IMAP on its way to Lagrange Point 1 are two additional rideshare payloads: NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) and the joint NASA/University of Illinois Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. Liftoff took place on Wednesday, Sept. 24,…
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Arriving at Titan: How Dragonfly’s Entry, Descent, and Landing will differ from Mars missions
Since the focus on Martian exploration ramped up in the mid-1990s, most of the familiarity with the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) sequence of landers and rovers to the surface of other planets has taken place against the backdrop of Mars. But when NASA‘s upcoming Dragonfly mission arrives at Titan for its own EDL, it…
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Dragonfly mission heads toward PDR, element fabrication from Lockheed Martin set to begin
Dragonfly, NASA’s unique robotic exploration mission using a rotorcraft to fly a science laboratory around the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, is continuing to march through its preliminary design steps. Rotor design and testing for the craft as well as Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) from Lockheed Martin on the subsystem portions of their contracted elements…
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Brace for impact: DART successfully slams into asteroid
NASA and Johns Hopkins teams have successfully tested the world’s first dedicated planetary defense mission: the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART impacted Dimorphos, a moonlet of near-Earth asteroid 65803 Didymos, at 7:14 PM EDT (23:14 UTC) on Monday, September 26, while traveling at an approximate speed of 22,000 kilometers per hour. DART’s collision with…