All articles tagged with #orbiter
NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract potentially worth up to $700 million to develop a Mars Telecommunications Network—a high‑performance orbiter to relay science data, imagery, navigation, and mission communications for spacecraft around Mars—by the end of 2028, a step toward supporting Artemis-era exploration and eventual crewed missions.
NASA has declared its MAVEN Mars orbiter dead after six months of radio silence. Launched in 2013 to study Mars’ atmosphere, MAVEN went silent after passing behind the planet in December, then spun and drained its batteries. A NASA review board concluded the spacecraft is unrecoverable, ending more than a decade of atmospheric observations and its role in relaying data from other Mars rovers.
A proposed mission called ODINUS aims to send twin orbiters to Uranus and Neptune in 2034 to explore these largely unvisited planets, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of their atmospheres, moons, and subsurface oceans, building on past discoveries and recent JWST images.
Researchers have proposed a radical new idea for a future Neptune orbiter mission by using the thin atmosphere of Triton, Neptune's largest moon, to capture a spacecraft. By employing an aeroshell similar to the one used in NASA's Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), the researchers suggest that the atmosphere of Triton could sufficiently slow a spacecraft and allow it to enter into a captured orbit around Neptune. This approach could potentially reduce the mission duration to as little as 15 years and provide an up-close view of Triton, delivering valuable scientific insights.
The European Space Agency celebrated the 20th birthday of its Mars Express orbiter by broadcasting the first-ever Mars livestream on June 2, 2023. The livestream lasted for approximately one hour and featured live images from the Visual Monitoring Camera on board the orbiter. The livestream was a success and can be watched on the ESA website.