Page 30 - Intro to Space Sciences Spacecraft Applications

Introduction and History 17

Space Shuttle in 1984 for a one-year stay, the Challenger accident delayed
its recovery until 1990 when it was finally returned to earth for analysis.

Planetary Exploration. Planetary exploration began with flights to our
nearest neighbor, the moon. Before sending men there, several Ranger
spacecraft were sent crashing into the lunar surface, sending back high-
resolution photographs right up until impact. Lunar Orbiters pho-
tographed the moon from orbit to locate possible landing sites, and Sur-
veyor craft soft-landed on the moon and sent back photos and conducted
lunar soil sampling experiments.
Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to fly by another planet, passing
within 21,000 miles of Venus in December 1962. Subsequent Mariner and
Pioneer spacecraft were sent toward Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn-all the planets known to early astronomers! In 1976, two Viking
spacecraft successfully landed on Mars, sending back pictures of the Mar-
tian landscape and conducting soil and atmospheric experiments. Spec-
tacular pictures and a wealth of planetary information on Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune were sent back from the two Voyager spacecraft,
now on their way out of our solar system. The Magellan spacecraft used
synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to map more than 98 percent of the surface
of the cloud-enshrouded planet Venus from September 1990 to September
1992. Galileo, deployed in October 1989 from the Space Shuttle, used

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Figure 1-12. The Pioneer spacecraft made the first “up close” observations
of many of the planets.