Pictures of Spacecraft

The Delta IV Heavy

In early 2014, the Orion MPCV will be sent on Exploration Test Flight 1, a shakedown cruise to test the capsule's capabilities. Because the SLS is still under construction, Lockheed Martin has selected a Delta IV Heavy to use for the test. In this photo, a Delta IV Heavy stands ready to launch NROL-26, a classified U.S. satellite.

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Diagram of the Dawn spacecraft

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Cassini-Huygens at Saturn

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Boeing's CST-100

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Akatsuki: "I'll be back!" Venus: "I'm waiting you"

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Formation flying

The current A-train leader is Aqua, which is always a minimum 10 seconds ahead of CloudSat, the second member. CloudSat stays at least 17.5 seconds ahead of CALIPSO, which maintains a minimum distance of 343 seconds from Aura, the train's "caboose."

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ChemCam's spark

The ChemCam instrument for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission uses a pulsed laser beam to vaporize a pinhead-size target, producing a flash of light from the ionized material -- plasma -- that can be analyzed to identify chemical elements in the target.

This image from testing of ChemCam shows a ball of luminous plasma erupting from the surface of an iron pyrite crystal in the sample chamber approximately 3 meters from the instrument. The laser beam itself is invisible.

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Encouragement for everyone back home

In a cartoon posted by @Akatsuki_JAXA (the Twitter identity of Japan's Venus spacecraft), Japan's spacecraft are offering encouragement to the people in their quake- and tsunami-struck homeland. A literal translation of the text, by @kazenoiro: "Everybody in Japan! Do your best. Help each other," and "We continue to send our heart (cheer and pray) from space." A looser trans

Filed under pretty pictures, spacecraft, art, fun, Hayabusa (MUSES-C), IKAROS, Akatsuki (Planet-C)

Aqua

A rendering of the Aqua satellite orbiting Earth. Aqua carries six instruments used to study Earth's water cycle, one of which is AIRS, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder.

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