Here's what it might discoverĬeres is the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The much-anticipated JUICE mission to Jupiter launches today. We might even find more of these crater chains.

The European Space Agency’s Juice mission will visit the Jovian system in the 2030s and allow us to see the surfaces in greater detail than ever before. It is 162km in length and about 10km wide. The comet was seen breaking into multiple pieces and this gave an idea as to how these chains might form – the gravity from Jupiter pulls apart objects into many pieces that all impact close together.Įnki Catena is a chain of 13 craters which crosses from an area of dark to bright terrain on Ganymede. However, their origin remained under debate until the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was observed as it smashed into Jupiter. But one of the newest craters on the red planet is actually quite a dramatic one.Ĭhain of impact craters Enki Catena on Ganymede. There are many famous craters on Mars, from the homes of Mars rovers ( Gale Crater for Curiosity or Jezero for Perseverance) to the hypothesised source regions of Mars meteorites ( Tooting or Mojave). One of the most interesting of these was the Lunar Micro Ecosystem, a collection of seeds and insect eggs designed to see if life could flourish in a tiny biosphere on the surface. In 2019, a rover from the Chinese space agency, Chang'e 4, touched down in the basin and carried out the first scientific experiments there. It gives us a unique view of the interior of the Moon’s crust, with 4.2 billion years of history exposed. The depth excavated by the crater is almost as deep as the deepest ocean trenches on Earth. It is a prime site favoured by lunar scientists to visit and learn about our Moon’s geology. The Lunar Orbiters were all eventually commanded to crash on the Moon before their attitude control gas ran out so they would not present navigational or communications hazards to later Apollo flights.A colour-coded topographical image taken by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, showing the South Pole–Aitken basin in blue.The use of Lunar Orbiters for tracking to evaluate the Manned Space Flight Network tracking stations and Apollo Orbit Determination Program was successful, with three Lunar Orbiters (2, 3, and 5) being tracked simultaneously from August to October 1967.The radiation experiments confirmed that the design of Apollo hardware would protect the astronauts from average and greater-than-average short-term exposure to solar particle events.The micrometeoroid experiments recorded 22 impacts showing the average micrometeoroid flux near the Moon was about two orders of magnitude greater than in interplanetary space but slightly less than in the near-Earth environment.Altogether the Orbiters returned 2,180 high resolution and 882 medium resolution frames. These 5 Lunar Orbiters which returned photography of 99% of the surface of the Moon (near and far side) with resolution down to 1 meter.The Lunar Orbiter program was managed by NASA Langley Research Center and involved building and launching 5 spacecraft to the Moon at a total cost of $163 million. Related: The spectacular Earthrise as seen from the Moon by the Soviet Zond 7 spacecraft Lunar Orbiter Program

Deorbiting prevented interference with future Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. On October 29, with the spacecraft’s systems deteriorating and its fuel tanks nearly empty, ground controllers commanded Lunar Orbiter 1 to fire its engine to crash it onto the Moon on its 577th orbit. When its photography mission was completed, it continued to return radiation, micrometeoroid, and engineering data, and tracking of its orbit enabled a preliminary understanding of mass concentrations, or mascons, on the Moon that over time perturbed the spacecraft’s trajectory. The spacecraft photographed all the planned potential Apollo landing sites, returning the highest resolution images of the Moon’s near and far sides to that time. It took its last photograph of the Moon on August 28. Until September 16, Lunar Orbiter 1 transferred a total of 229 images of the Moon (42 high-resolution and 187 medium-resolution photos) to the Earth. This version was released by NASA in 2008. The reprocessed version of The first photograph of Earth from the Moon’s orbit.

Lunar orbiter 1