Space probes

1

The year started well for space missions because on December 31, 2011 and January 1, 2012 the two twin spacecraft that make up the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission launched last September entered lunar orbit about twenty-four hours away from each other.

Titan and Dione with Saturn rings in the background (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

0

One of the photographs taken by the Cassini spacecraft is truly extraordinary: Titan and Dione appear so close as to touch each other and in the background there are Saturn’s rings. Actually, Titan is at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Cassini while Dione is about 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from the spacecraft. It’s therefore an optical effect but the combination of elements is really fantastic!

Asteroid Vesta's southern emisphere in a Rainbow-Colored Palette (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

0

The mission of the space probe Dawn is allowing us to discover more and more information about Vesta, the second celestial object in size in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter after dwarf planet Ceres.