Destination Space

Here are the great robotic missions to explore space.

18:04 02 August 2015

Several great robotic missions to explore space have been immensely successful. Just recently, the New Horizons spacecraft gave the world a first look at Pluto. And just this week, scientists have published results from the Philae lander, which touched down the comet last year, leaving the world in awe.

 

Below are five other robotic space missions that had the same effect:

 

1.     Hubble Space Telescope. For 25 years, HST has remained in Earth’s orbit but through its powerful mirror, it shown us that our galaxy is just among 100 million.  It took pictures of clouds of gas that come together to give birth to stars as well as images of other stars dying cataclysmically in spectacular supernovas.

 

 

 

2.     Voyager 1& 2. The two voyagers were launched in 1977, which started a journey that took them to the outer reaches of the Solar System. Voyager 1 is now the first human-made object to have left the Solar System and entered a new region of space.

 

 

3.     Cassini-Huygnes. This provided scientists with amazing details about Saturn. The first colour it produced showed orange skies, a recently dried-up lake bed, a thick fog in the background, and cold, hard pebbles made of water-ice in the foreground.

 

 

4.     Viking, Spirit, and Opportunity. Viking Lander set down on the Martian surface in 1976, producing the first panoramic photograph from Mars. Meanwhile, the twin Nasa rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, toured the Red Planet, providing the planet’s diverse terrain in exquisite detail.

 

 

5.     Giotto. The Giotto mission was the first to look inside a comet in 1986. It discovered that Halley, the most famous comet, had a dark, dusty peanut-shaped body. It also detected jets of gas being pushed from the comet’s core.