The Gemini program primarily tested equipment and mission procedures and trained astronauts and ground crews for future Apollo missions to the Moon. Gemini IV spacewalk, June 3, Time exposure image of Gemini X spacecraft, launched July 18, Astronauts John Young and Mike Collins carried out a three-day mission to rendezvous and dock in space with an Agena spacecraft that had lifted off minutes earlier.
This mission tested the new maneuverable spacecraft that let the astronauts control more of the flight. Exactly eight years, one month and 26 days after President Kennedy challenged Americans to reach for the Moon, Project Apollo landed the first humans on the lunar surface and returned them safely to Earth. The ascent stage of the Apollo 11 lunar module approaching the command module for docking before the crew returned to Earth.
The Apollo program was hit by tragedy as the first crew prepared to fly. On Jan. NASA was not deterred, but rather changed how things were done to ensure the safety and success of future missions.
Commander Wally Schirra looking out the rendezvous window in front of the commander's station of the Apollo 7 Earth orbital mission, Oct. Fifty years ago, Apollo 7 transmitted the first live TV broadcast from a human U. The famous 'Earthrise' photo from Apollo 8, the first human mission to the Moon. Audio: Apollo 8 Christmas Eve. This is one of the few photos that shows Armstrong during the moonwalk. Audio: Apollo 11 One Small Step. In , Skylab expeditions paved the way for the International Space Station.
The four, windmill-like solar arrays were attached to the Apollo Telescope Mount. In the s, U. January 28 - The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded seconds after liftoff. February 20 - The core section of the Space Station Mir was launched. September 12 - Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space. December - The Galileo probe began transmitting data on Jupiter. August 8 - Space Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted off with teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan aboard as a crewmember.
Morgan was the first teacher in space since the Challenger disaster in Scientists later reported that Phoenix discovered chunks of ice. Its mission is to search for planets outside our solar system, in a distant area of the Milky Way.
The mission is to confirm the presence or absence of ice on the moon. This vehicle is a suborbital plane designed to take private citizens on suborbital space flights. December 8 - A private company named SpaceX launched a spacecraft into orbit and returned it to earth safely. It was the first non-government organization to accomplish this. November 26 - NASA launched Curiosity, the biggest, best equipped robot ever sent to explore another planet.
It will reach Mars in The explosion occurred 73 seconds into the flight as a result of a leak in one of two Solid Rocket Boosters that ignited the main liquid fuel tank. The crewmembers of the Challenger represented a cross-section of the American population in terms of race, gender, geography, background, and religion.
The explosion became one of the most significant events of the s, as billions around the world saw the accident on television and empathized with any one of the seven crewmembers killed. With this accident the Space Shuttle program went into hiatus as investigations, restructuring of management, and technical alterations to systems took place.
On 12 May James C. Fletcher became the NASA Administrator for a second time, having previously served between and , with the explicit task of overseeing the Agency's recovery from the accident. Rogers, was deliberate and thorough and its findings gave as much emphasis to the accident's managerial as to its technical origins.
Astronaut Richard H. This would enable the Agency to continue its efforts to build the international Space Station. It was an ambitious project to return to fuel saving, propeller-driven aircraft. At its height it involved over 40 industrial contracts, 15 university grants, and contracts with all four NASA research centers, Lewis, Langley, Dryden, and Ames. The progress of the advanced turboprop development seemed to foreshadow its future dominance of commercial flight.
The project had four technical stages: "concept development" from to ; "enabling technology" from to ; "large scale integration" from to ; and finally "flight research" in During each of these stages NASA's engineers confronted and solved specific technical problems that were necessary for the advanced turboprop project to meet the defined government objectives concerning safety, efficiency, and environmental protection.
NASA Lewis marshaled the resources and support of the United States aeronautical community to bring the development of the new technology to the point of successful flight testing. During this mission the crew launched the TDRS 3 satellite.
The Magellan spacecraft set out for Venus to map the surface from orbit with imaging radar. The probe arrived at Venus in Sep. The amount of digital imaging data the spacecraft returned was more than twice the sum of all returns from previous missions.
This data provided some surprises: among them the discovery that plate tectonics was at work on Venus and that lava flows showed clearly the evidence of volcanic activity. In , at the end of its mission, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shut down the major functions of the Magellan spacecraft and scientists turned their attention to a detailed analysis of its data.
On the way to Jupiter Galileo encountered both Venus and the Earth and made the first close flyby of asteroid Gaspra in , providing scientific data on all. Without this antenna, communication with the spacecraft was both more difficult and time-consuming, and data transmission was greatly hampered.
The engineering team working on the project tried a series of cooling exercises designed to shrink the antenna central tower and enable its deployment. Over a period of several months they worked on this maneuver repeatedly, but were unable to free the antenna. Even with the aberration, Hubble has made many important astronomical discoveries, including striking images of galaxy M87, providing evidence of a potentially massive black hole.
On this date Augustine submitted his commission's report, delineating the chief objectives of the agency and recommending several key actions. All of these related to the need to create a balanced space program-one that included human space flight, robotic probes, space science, applications, and exploration-within a tightly constrained budget. This research was important because the tendency of airplanes to stall at low speeds and high angles of attack severely limited their ability to maneuver.
The HARV vehicle had begun control flights without the paddles to study airflow at up to 55 degrees angle of attack in Then in the five years after , the HARV reached a controllable angle of attack of 70 degrees and also explored the maneuverability and control benefits of thrust vectoring.
In addition, the HARV made a significant contribution to the applicability of computational fluid dynamics CFD to high angle-of-attack flows by providing a comparison of CFD, wind-tunnel, and flight data at the same scale. The spacecraft was to provide the most detailed data available about Mars as it orbited the planet since what had been collected by the Viking probes of the mids.
The mission was progressing smoothly until about 9 p. The engineering team working on the project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory responded with a series of commands to turn on the spacecraft's transmitter and to point the spacecraft's antennas toward Earth.
No signal from the spacecraft, however; the Mars Observer was not heard from again, probably because of an explosion in the propulsion system's tanks as they were pressurized. With no response from the Mars Observer , on 29 Oct. Covey and Kenneth D. Following a precise and flawless rendezvous, grapple, and berthing of the telescope in the cargo bay of the Shuttle, the Endeavour flight crew, in concert with controllers at Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, and Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, completed all eleven planned servicing tasks during five extravehicular activities for full accomplishment of all STS servicing objectives.
The Endeavour then provided HST with a reboost into a nautical-mile, nearly circular orbit. Re-deployment of a healthy HST back into orbit using the shuttle robotic arm occurred at a. EST on 10 Dec. Orbital verification of HST's improved capabilities occurred in early Jan. Endeavour , the newest of the orbiters, was named after the 18th century vessel captained by British explorer Capt. James Cook. The new Shuttle craft took its maiden voyage in May The spacecraft was launched on 25 Jan.
The spacecraft remained in geocentric orbit and continued testing the spacecraft components until the end of mission. Perhaps the most important scientific finding of the mission was the possibility of an abundant supply of water on the Moon that would make establishment of a self-sustaining lunar colony much more feasible and less expensive than presently thought. Study of lunar samples revealed that the interior of the Moon is essentially devoid of water, so no underground supplies could be used by lunar inhabitants.
However, the lunar surface is bombarded with water-rich objects such as comets, and scientists have suspected that some of the water in these objects could migrate to permanently dark areas at the lunar poles, perhaps accumulating to useable quantities.
Analysis of data returned from a radio-wave experiment performed by Clementine revealed that deposits of ice exist in permanently dark regions near the south pole of the Moon. Initial estimates suggested that the volume of a small lake exists, 1 billion cubic meters. Bolden and Kenneth S.
Reightler, Jr. Krikalev, veteran of two lengthy stays aboard the Russian Mir Space Station. This mission underlined the newly inaugurated cooperation in space between Russia and the U. It also featured the first time that a woman pilot, Eileen M. Collins, flew the Space Shuttle. Vladimir Titov is also aboard, the first Russian to be launched aboard a U. Atlantis docked with Mir on 29 Jul. At the end of joint docked activities on 4 Jul.
Thagard returned home with the American record for a single space flight with more than days in space. Thagard broke that record on 6 Jun. NASA Dryden engineers and pilots began developing the system in the wake of a long series of failures of hydraulic flight control systems in the s, three of which resulted in crashes claiming the lives of over 1, people. The system evolved through landings by NASA research pilot Gordon Fullerton of a NASA F research aircraft using a similar system in April and of the MD in August with a prototype system that required him to use cockpit knobs and thumbwheels aided by a still-developing software system.
The system used for landings on 28 and 30 November relieved the pilot of virtually all manual manipulation beyond engaging the auto-land system. The PCA system has the potential of providing aircraft a back-up system to enable safe landings in the event the airplane loses its hydraulic controls.
The team of scientists recounted the meteor's history, found in Antarctica in and why they suspect it is from Mars. The 4. When ALH formed as an igneous rock about 4. Then, about 15 million years ago, a large asteroid hit the Red Planet and jettisoned the rock into space where it remained until it crashed into Antarctica about 11, B. McKay and Everett K. Gibson, Jr. During their two-and-a-half year investigation, the JSC team found trace minerals in the meteor that are usually associated with microscopic organisms.
Finally, discovered organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PAHs in ALH, usually resulting when microorganisms die and their complex organic molecules breakdown. They called for additional research from other scientists either to confirm or refute these findings. Many scientists and science fiction writers have speculated that Europa-in addition to Mars and Saturn's moon Titan-is one of the three planetary bodies in this Solar System that might possess, or may have possessed, an environment where primitive life can exist.
Galileo's photos of Europa were taken during a flyby of Ganymede some 96, miles away from Europa. They reveal what look like ice floes similar to those seen in Earth's polar regions. The pictures also reveal what look like giant cracks in Europa's ice where warm water "environmental niches" may exist.
Although NASA officials stressed that the photos do not conclusively prove anything, they do think that the images are exciting, compelling, and suggestive. Astronaut Lucid set a new record for an American living in space and broke the world's record for a woman living in space by spending days aboard the Russian Mir Space Station. President Clinton presented Lucid, who conducted microgravity and life sciences experiments aboard the Mir , with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in an early December ceremony, citing Lucid "for her contributions to international cooperation in space Shannon Lucid is an explorer in the best tradition of those who dare to challenge the unknown.
This conclusion was based on a census of 27 nearby galaxies carried out by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Hawaii, which were used to conduct a spectroscopic and photometric survey of galaxies to find black holes which have consumed the mass of millions of Sun-like stars. The key results are: 1 supermassive black holes are so common that nearly every large galaxy has one, 2 a black hole's mass is proportional to the mass of the host galaxy, so that, for example, a galaxy twice as massive as another would have a black hole that is also twice as massive, 3 the number and masses of the black holes found are consistent with what would have been required to power the quasars.
This mission replaced the near-infra red camera NICMOS and the two-dimensional spectrograph and repaired insulation on the telescope. Images captured during Galileo's closest flyby of Europa showed features of the Jovian moon, lending credence to the possibility of hidden, subsurface oceans. The findings generated new questions about the possibility of life on Europa.
Amateur astronomers around the world were also put on watch the first week of May when space scientists predicted based on earlier data from ISTP spacecraft estimated that Comet Hale-Bopp's ion tail likely would be disrupted when it enters a region around the Sun known as the "current sheet.
The comet first appeared in the spring and excited astronomers for its high visibility and ready analysis. A small, pound robotic rover, named Sojourner , departed the main lander and began to record weather patterns, atmospheric opacity, and the chemical composition of rocks washed down into the Ares Vallis flood plain, an ancient outflow channel in Mars' northern hemisphere.
This vehicle completed its projected milestone day mission on 3 Aug. In all, the Pathfinder mission returned more than 1. The images from both craft were posted to the Internet, to which individuals turned for information about the mission more than million times through the end of July.
Positioned between the Sun and the Earth, the spacecraft intercepts solar winds and geomagnetic activity and allows forecasters to warn users such as satellite operators, power control centers, and others of the threat to their electronic systems resulting from sudden fluctuations in solar energy reaching Earth.
The spacecraft's magnetometer, detected a magnetic field on 15 Sep. The existence of a planetary magnetic field has important implications for the geological history of Mars and for the possible development and continued existence of life on Mars.
The magnetic field had important implications for the evolution of Mars. Planets like Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn generate their magnetic fields by means of a dynamo made up of moving molten metal at the core. This metal is a very good conductor of electricity, and the rotation of the planet creates electrical currents deep within the planet that give rise to the magnetic field.
A molten interior suggests the existence of internal heat sources, which could give rise to volcanoes and a flowing crust responsible for moving continents over geologic time periods. It also delivered a Spektor module repair kit pounds , which enabled the station crew to begin serious repairs damaged in the Progress collision of 25 Jun. The mission also delivered 1, pounds of water; 1, pounds of U. Atlantis also flew around Mir to assess the damage to the station.
The astronaut Michael Foale also departed for Earth after a stay of nearly five months and was replaced by astronaut David Wolf. These new findings will help scientists understand the famous year sunspot cycle and associated increases in solar activity that can disrupt the Earth's power and communications systems. Developed as part of the Discovery program of frequent, low-cost missions, Lunar Prospector carried a small payload of only five instruments.
Besides water, Lunar Prospector was also to look for other natural resources, such as minerals and gases, that could be used to build and sustain a future human lunar base or in manufacturing fuel for launching spacecraft from the Moon to the rest of the Solar System.
The spacecraft's Gamma Ray Spectrometer will also collect a large amount of scientific data about chemical composition of the lunar surface and will measure the Moon's magnetic and gravitational fields. Its Alpha Particle Spectrometer will sniff out small quantities of gases that leak out from the lunar interior.
Collectively, the scientific data that Prospector will send back to Earth will help researchers construct a more complete and detailed map of the Moon. In Mar. The lunar water ice is estimated at an overall range of eleven million to million tons of lunar water ice dispersed over 3, to 18, square miles of water ice-bearing deposits across the northern pole, and an additional 1, to 7, square miles across the southern polar region. Furthermore, twice as much of the water ice mixture was detected by Lunar Prospector at the Moon's north pole as at the south.
EST and completed a descent from a 23, foot altitude at a. The test focused on the use of the X's parafoil parachute, which deployed as planned within seconds after the vehicle's release from the B and guided the test craft to landing.
Atmospheric tests of the X will continue for the next two years using three increasingly complex test vehicles. The drop tests will increase in altitude to a height of 50, feet and include longer flight times for the test craft prior to deployment of the parafoil.
In , an unpiloted space test vehicle is planned to be deployed from a Space Shuttle and descend to a landing. The X crew return vehicle is targeted to begin operations aboard the International Space Station in
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