gravity assist
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Twin Probes Suffer Thruster Glitch on the Way to Mercury
For more than five years, a pair of spacecraft have been traveling through the solar system to reach the innermost planet Mercury and observe its extreme conditions. During its complex journey, the BepiColombo mission ran into a problem that’s preventing its thrusters from operating at full power, potentially jeopardizing the mission. BepiColombo launched in October…
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Another Lucy Bonus: Asteroid’s Surprise Moon Is Actually Two Rocks Stuck Together
The first look at the Dinkinesh asteroid revealed a surprise: The small space rock had its own moon. Now as the Lucy spacecraft downlinked more images of its first target, it showed not one but two tiny asteroids orbiting around Dinkinesh. NASA’s Lucy mission made a close flyby of the Dinkinesh asteroid on November 1,…
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Mercury Probe Flies Through Charged Particle Rain That Triggers the Planet’s Auroras
On October 1, 2021, a pair of small spacecraft got their first good look at the closest planet to the Sun, revealing the strange process through which Mercury produces its own auroras. BepiColombo, a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched in October 2018 and is still…
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Hear the ‘Sound’ of a Spacecraft Flying Past Venus
Two spacecraft zipped past Venus at nearly time this week, and we’re steadily getting more data from this rare double flyby. The research teams have even translated some of this data into sounds, which you can hear below.